Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🥫 The name is a scoreboard
There's a can in your garage with a record of failure printed on the front of it.
In 1953 a company in San Diego called Rocket Chemical had three employees and one job.
Make something that would stop metal from rusting.
Their customer was the aerospace industry, and the specific problem was water.
Water gets onto metal, metal corrodes, and a corroded missile shell is a serious matter.
So they mixed a formula and tested it.
It didn't work.
They mixed another one.
That didn't work either.
They kept going, numbering each attempt in the lab book as they went.
Formula eleven.
Formula twenty.
Formula thirty-three.
Every one a failure, and every one recorded.
Ouch.
Then one worked.
Forty.
Water Displacement, fortieth formula.
WD-40.
They didn't rename it afterwards to sound better, and hundreds of millions of cans have carried that number since.
Formula thirty-nine and formula forty looked identical the morning they were mixed.
Two more attempts from a three-person company that hadn't produced anything sellable in months.
One of them led nowhere.
The other is still on the shelf in your garage.
The difference was invisible until the day it wasn't.
⛳️ The problem
Rocket Chemical failed thirty-nine times, and the failures are printed on the can.
Meanwhile, our newsletter's subscriber count hasn't moved in four months.
We've started to believe it's never gonna move.
📅 Every Monday and every Thursday
James Clear published an article on his own website and had zero readers.
That was the twelfth of November 2012.
Then he did something fairly boring.
He wrote a new article every Monday and every Thursday, and kept doing it.
Not a big launch.
Not a viral push.
Two articles a week, on the same two days, for years.
Turns out the book that made his name, Atomic Habits, didn't come out until October 2018.
Six years after that first post.
Get this — it has since sold more than twenty-five million copies, and his Thursday newsletter goes out to more than three million people.
Now rewind to year three.
No book deal, no advance, and no way to know either was coming.
The archive James was building, and the skill he was building with it, didn't show up anywhere he could point to at the time.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Valley of Disappointment
The chemists logged thirty-nine formulas that did nothing.
James published every Monday and Thursday for six years before the book existed.
James's own name for that stretch is the Valley of Disappointment.
It's the gap between doing the work and seeing anything come back from it.
The results are late, not missing.
So four quiet months stop being proof that the work is failing.
You keep going, because now you know what a flat month means.
The number on the can is 40 because the first thirty-nine did not work.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'showing you that building a business is fun, not a drain' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below works out whether you are in that gap or genuinely on the wrong road — and what crossing
would actually look like, so you can recognize it when it happens.
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.
- Do not reassure me. If the evidence genuinely says dead end rather than valley, say so and say which evidence.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I am building, and how long I have been at it:
{e.g. a weekly newsletter about switching from nursing into health tech, 19 weeks}
What has actually happened so far, good and bad:
{e.g. 214 subscribers, up from 190 two months ago. Two replies ever. One person forwarded it to her whole team}
What I expected by now, honestly:
{e.g. a thousand subscribers and someone asking me to write for them}
What I have already changed since starting:
{e.g. the name once, the send day twice, and I rewrote the landing page in March}
Someone further along than me doing something similar:
{e.g. a nurse-turned-product-manager who now has 40,000 readers}
For Audience: {e.g. nurses five to fifteen years in, thinking about leaving the ward}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. Valley or dead end — which one the evidence points to, and the specific thing in my inputs that decides it.
2. What is being stored — name what has accumulated that does not show in any number yet, in plain terms.
3. The comparison — how long the person I named took to reach visible results, and where that puts me on the same curve.
4. My crossing signal — the first concrete sign that I am through it, described so I will recognize it rather than miss it.
5. The restart cost — what each change I already made did to the clock, and what it would cost to start over somewhere new.
Then tell me the honest expected wait: how much longer this normally takes before anything shows.