Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Kate’s two lost weeks
Kate is an HR manager who runs a podcast on the side, for people changing careers in their 40s.
Right now, she’s building a small online tool for her listeners, and she went straight to building it.
She spent week one on the tool and week two on the login page.
In week three, she finally understood what she was building.
It was not what she had started building.
So she deletes two weeks of work, and she never gets those two weeks back.
🧩 Her struggle:
She figures out what she’s building while she builds it, so every wrong guess costs her weeks.
Waiting for a flight, she picks up a business magazine someone left on the seat,
and reads the true story of a founder whose team also didn’t know yet what it was building,
and who built Amazon into a company worth more than $1 trillion.
One short question changed what his team built.
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📝 “Where are the mock-ups?”
In 2004, Amazon’s leadership wanted a new digital media business.
The team made its pitch the usual way:
slides, an estimate of how big the market was, and a plan for the bosses to approve.
Jeff Bezos looked at it and asked one question: “Where are the mock-ups?”
There weren’t any.
Get this — the mock-ups took weeks to make, and every meeting slowed down.
So Bezos had each team write the press release instead, the announcement for the day it launched, as if the product already existed.
Writing the press release showed the team something the slides never had.
Back then, you could only read an e-book on your computer, and the selection was tiny.
Finish that book, and you had to go back to the computer and do it again for the next one.
You couldn’t write an exciting launch announcement around any of that.
So the team wrote down what the device really had to do: stay connected on its own, with no computer.
Buy a book, and it would just be there.
That device became the Kindle.
The same practice — write the press release before you build anything — is how Amazon started AWS, Alexa, and Prime Video too.
It’s still how Amazon starts every new product today.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ Working Backwards
Jeff had Amazon write the launch announcement before the product existed,
and writing it showed Amazon’s team what the Kindle had to be.
Amazon’s strategy is called Working Backwards.
He didn’t plan more than the rest of us.
He settled every hard decision on paper first, before the engineers or the money ever got involved.
So you find out whether the idea works while it still costs nothing to change it.
One afternoon of writing the launch announcement saves several weeks or months of building the wrong thing.
Your AI sidekick can play the skeptical reader and poke holes in your launch announcement before anyone else sees it.
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🛠️ Kate’s turn
Remember Kate, who threw away two weeks of work on a tool for her podcast listeners before she knew what it was?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what she wants the tool to do for her listeners.
The reply from her AI sidekick is short:
Your announcement can’t say why a listener would pay for this, so answer that before you build anything.
She doesn’t open the code that night.
The next morning, she emails ten listeners and asks what they use today instead.
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🌅 One month later
Kate’s announcement fits on one page now, and every sentence in it is clear.
Twelve listeners have asked to be the first to try the tool.
Nothing she has built this month has been thrown away.
You might be halfway through building something you haven’t described on paper yet.
Write the launch announcement before you build anything.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘helping you build a smart AI sidekick so you can work less and enjoy life more’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below writes the launch announcement for the thing you have not built, then tells you what the writing exposed.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you’re thinking of building, and who it’s for, specifically
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. a paid tool that plans a career change week by week, for people in their 40s who still have their old jobWhat they do today instead, and why they would pay rather than keep doing that
- e.g. a spreadsheet and whatever career advice they find online, and honestly I am not sure yet why they would payWhat it would cost them
- e.g. $20 a month
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my files, my notes, and my drafts, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume people in their 40s who want to change careers.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Write in full sentences throughout. No bullet points anywhere in the announcement — fragments are what let a vague idea survive.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I am thinking of building, and who it is for, specifically:
{e.g. a paid tool that plans a career change week by week, for people in their 40s who still have their old job}
What they do today instead, and why they would pay rather than keep doing that:
{e.g. a spreadsheet and whatever career advice they find online, and honestly I am not sure yet why they would pay}
What it would cost them:
{e.g. $20 a month}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The announcement — the launch note as it would read on the day, in prose, from the reader's point of view, as if it already exists.
2. The customer's line — one sentence a real buyer would say about why they got it, in their words not mine.
3. What the writing exposed — every place I could not write a clear sentence, named as the open question it actually is.
4. The dull test — read it back cold and say plainly whether anybody would care, and which sentence is doing the least work.
5. The smallest version — what I could build in two weeks that would still make that announcement true.
Then tell me the one question in output 3 I have to answer before building anything.