Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🙋♂️ Wes’s buried best part
Wes is a data analyst who writes a newsletter about money on the side.
The best part of this week’s issue is halfway down the page, and almost nobody reads that far.
Every reply he gets only talks about the first paragraph.
His struggle:
He opens with a few slow lines before he gets to the point, so readers leave before the best part.
Then, clearing out old magazines, he runs into the true story of a man
who also needed people to read to the very end, because his ads ran hundreds of words long.
He built a company that made about $12 million a year.
Twelve million dollars a year, from words on a page?
✉️ The basement that sold by mail
Joe Sugarman set up in his family’s basement in Northbrook, Illinois, and started selling gadgets by mail.
The year was 1971.
Pocket calculators, digital watches, tiny chess computers.
He had no store, no salespeople and no television.
He had one page in a magazine, and whatever a stranger decided while looking at it.
That’s a hard place to sell from.
A page can’t answer a question, and the reader is holding a magazine full of other pages.
So he stopped writing advertisements and started writing things people finished.
Get this — his ads ran long, hundreds of words about a calculator, and people read all of them.
By 1979 that basement company was making around $12 million a year and employed about seventy people.
Later he sold a pair of sunglasses called BluBlockers the same way, and sold tens of millions of pairs.
He was not a better writer than the people he beat.
He had a rule about sentences and they did not.
And what was it?
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Slippery Slide
Joe started in a basement and grew to $12 million a year, with ads people read all the way through.
Joe’s strategy is called The Slippery Slide, and his rule is that every sentence has exactly one job.
The job is never to inform.
It’s to get the next sentence read.
So you stop asking whether a line is good and start asking whether it makes the reader want the next line.
Your best lines actually get read, because people are still reading the article.
🛠️ Wes’s turn
Now, back to Wes, whose readers leave his newsletter before they reach the best part.
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it the opening of this week’s issue.
His AI sidekick puts it plainly:
Your advice is fine, but your second sentence gives readers no reason to read the third.
He deletes the warm-up.
He moves the best part up to line three,
and makes every line before it leave one question open.
🌅 Six weeks later
Wes still writes the same kind of advice.
But now the replies talk about the part halfway down the page,
and some readers write back about the very last line.
Your advice is probably good enough already.
Write every line so the reader wants the next one.
That’s it, my fellow renegades!
Yours ‘helping you gain years of experience without putting in the years’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below takes something you already published and finds the exact line where
readers stop — then rebuilds the opening so they keep reading.
🧰 What you’ll need
The opening of something you published
- The title and the first eight or so lines. Copy and paste them.
- e.g. “What inflation really means for your paycheck / This week I want to walk through the latest inflation report, because a lot of people have been asking me what the numbers mean, and I think the plain version is more useful than the headlines.”The single best thing buried further down it
- e.g. that a 3% raise in a year when prices rose 4% is really a pay cutWhere your readers read it
- e.g. in the Gmail app, on a phone, before a meeting
🚀 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 drafts, my sent issues, or my subscriber dashboard, 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 who want to understand money numbers without the jargon.
- 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.
- If you can see my published posts or newsletter archive directly, take the most recent one. Otherwise, use what I paste below.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Paste the opening of something I published — the title and the first eight or so lines:
{e.g. "What inflation really means for your paycheck / This week I want to walk through the latest inflation report, because a lot of people have been asking me what the numbers mean, and I think the plain version is more useful than the headlines."}
The single best thing buried further down it:
{e.g. that a 3% raise in a year when prices rose 4% is really a pay cut}
Where they read it:
{e.g. in the Gmail app, on a phone, before a meeting}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The stopping line — the exact sentence where an average reader gives up, and why that one.
2. What each opening line is doing — line by line, name the job each one performs, and flag every line whose job is only "informing."
3. A first sentence under eight words that is almost impossible not to finish.
4. The rebuilt opening — the same eight lines, each leaving one thing unfinished, ending at the buried point above.
5. What I moved up — say plainly what is now in line three that used to be in paragraph nine.
Then tell me the ONE sentence in my original that was doing no job at all.