Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Willa writes a weekly newsletter about smoothies and fast, healthy breakfasts.
She started it for people who skip breakfast because mornings are pure chaos.
To her, a good breakfast is five minutes and a blender — not a project.
Willa's readers want the same — quick, not a boring granola bar.
⛳️ Problem:
Willa forces ideas out by hand every week, brainstorming until her head hurts.
She crosses out the bad ones, then settles for something flat and forgettable.
A year in, idea day is still the slowest, most dreaded part of her week. Ouch.
Her struggle:
She tries to invent ideas from nothing, so she runs dry and dreads the blank page.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Idea Mashup
Think about how a child turns out.
They get mom's eyes and dad's laugh — a brand-new mix of two people.
Not a copy of either one. Something fresh, made from both.
Wild, right?
Ideas work the exact same way.
That's a trick James Altucher swears by.
He built and sold two companies — his web firm Reset sold for around $15 million.
He later sold his finance site StockPickr to TheStreet, a public company.
His move is simple: mash two ideas you already have into a fresh third one.
Not one brilliant idea out of nowhere — a new mix of two ordinary ones.
Your topic, crossed with almost anything, gives you ideas nobody else would think of.
You never run dry, because you're not inventing from scratch.
You just keep combining what you already have in new ways, over and over.
🚗 So Willa tried it her way.
Recall Willa and her newsletter on fast, healthy breakfasts?
She'd been grinding out ideas by hand every week, and dreading it.
So she tried the idea mashup instead.
She took her topic — five-minute breakfasts — and crossed it with things she loves.
Breakfast crossed with travel became "a five-minute breakfast from a different country each week."
Breakfast crossed with her readers' chaos became "breakfasts for the morning you slept through the alarm."
Get this — one topic, crossed with anything, and the ideas kept coming.
In ten minutes she had a month of issues, each one unmistakably hers.
Plot twist: she wasn't waiting for the perfect idea to appear anymore.
She just combined what she already had — and never stared at a blank page again.
Bingo.
🧸 Never run dry. Cross your topic with anything, and fresh ideas fall out.
The prompt below crosses your topic with dozens of other worlds, so fresh ideas fall out.
You just tell it your topic and a few things you're into.
🏄♀️ The prompt
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Update your input values in the prompt, or just run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use the example values and give you an output.
CONTEXT:
- (use what's available, fall back to the inline values)
- If my Voice Profile exists, write in that voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If my ICP / Audience doc exists, target that reader. Otherwise, use the audience below.
Inputs:
My topic (what my newsletter or channel is about):
{e.g. smoothies and fast, healthy breakfasts for people who hate mornings}
A handful of other worlds I'm into or know well (the more unrelated, the better):
{e.g. travel, budgeting, 90s movies, weightlifting, parenting}
My readers' real life (the specific messes and moments they live):
{e.g. slept through the alarm, no fruit in the house, kids screaming, zero time}
For Outcome: {e.g. a month of issue ideas that are unmistakably mine}
Outputs:
1. Thirty crossovers — my topic crossed with each of my other worlds and my readers' real moments, one idea per line.
2. The most-me shortlist — the 5 crossovers that only I could have written, with one line each on why they fit me.
3. The dud cut — the crossovers that feel forced or generic, flagged so I skip them.
4. The one to write first — the single strongest idea, turned into a working title and a one-line promise.
Then name two more "worlds" from my own life I should feed you next, so the next batch is even harder for anyone else to copy.
That's it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours 'proving one person with an AI sidekick can build something amazingly big' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️