Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Eric writes a newsletter about planning family road trips.
He's driven his family across the country more times than he can count.
He's sure any family can plan a road trip without the chaos.
Eric's readers are parents planning a big trip, feeling overwhelmed — they want a smooth trip, not three tired kids fighting in the back seat.
⛳️ Problem:
Eric wants to launch a product, so he keeps hunting for a big, original idea.
He brainstorms, rejects everything, and waits for a flash of genius.
Months pass, and the blank page stays blank. Ouch.
His struggle:
He thinks a product needs a brand-new idea, so he never looks at the planning tools he's already built for himself.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Byproduct Sale
Think about a lumber mill cutting boards.
All day it makes a "waste" pile of sawdust in the corner.
Then - wait for it - someone bags it, sells it as garden mulch, and the leftover becomes a business.
That's what Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson did.
They ran a web-design agency and built a little tool just to manage their own client projects.
That internal tool became Basecamp — a software company that's been profitable for over twenty years.
Their idea: you don't need a brand-new invention.
The work you already do throws off byproducts — a system, a checklist, a template, notes.
Someone else would pay for that byproduct, because it's exactly what they're struggling to make.
Stop waiting for a big original idea.
Look at what your own work already produces, and sell that.
🚗 So Eric tried it his way.
Remember Eric and the big product idea he kept hunting for?
He'd been waiting for a flash of genius, ignoring what was right in front of him.
So he looked at the byproduct of his own trips instead.
Every family trip, he built a detailed planning spreadsheet — stops, snacks, hotels, playlists.
Turns out he'd made a dozen of them for himself, never thinking they counted.
That was the byproduct: the exact thing his overwhelmed readers were desperate for.
So he cleaned one up and sold it as a $29 road-trip planning kit.
Ta-da — a product, out of a spreadsheet he already had.
It wasn't a new invention — just the tool he already made, packaged for someone else.
He didn't need a flash of genius.
Plot twist: the product was sitting in his own computer files the whole time.
He sold the exact spreadsheet he'd already been building for every trip, all along.
🧸 Stop hunting for a big idea. The byproduct of your own work is a product someone will buy.
The prompt below finds the sellable byproducts hiding in your everyday work.
You just tell it what you already make for yourself.
🏄♀️ 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.
- If you can see my notes, documents, or files directly, hunt through them for byproducts I've forgotten I made. Otherwise, use what I paste below.
Inputs:
The work I already do (my process, and the things I make along the way just for myself):
{e.g. planning family road trips — I build a detailed spreadsheet of stops, snacks, hotels, playlists}
Who my readers are and what they struggle to make themselves:
{e.g. overwhelmed parents who dread planning a big road trip}
The "waste pile" I overlook (templates, checklists, notes, systems I've never thought to sell — list them here if you can't see my notes and files):
{e.g. a dozen old trip spreadsheets sitting in my drive}
For Outcome: {e.g. a product I can sell that's a byproduct of work I already do}
Outputs:
1. My byproducts — the systems, templates, checklists, or notes my own work already produces.
2. The one to sell first — the byproduct my readers most need, that's closest to ready.
3. The cleanup list — the few tweaks to turn my personal version into something a stranger can use.
4. The offer — a plain title, a price, and a one-line pitch for that byproduct.
Then name the ONE thing I already make for myself that I've been overlooking as a product.
That's it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours 'helping you borrow the shortcuts from people who already made it' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️