Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Ethan’s one kind of issue
Ethan is a product manager who writes a newsletter on the side, for first-time product managers.
He settled on one format in the first month, and every issue since has been that format.
He writes a long how-to every week, because he thinks that’s what a serious newsletter looks like.
The numbers are flat, and every week he blames the same thing: his topic must be wrong.
🧩 His struggle:
He has only ever tried one kind of issue, so he can’t tell if the topic is the problem or the format is.
On his lunch break, he’s reading a newsletter that tells the real story of a man
who also couldn’t tell in advance which of his posts would work,
and later built a business past $10 million on what he wrote.
Justin didn’t start with a plan, just a lot of posts.
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🔁 The six months he spent making noise
Justin Welsh had spent years raising money for startups, more than $300 million of it.
He kept noticing that people making content earned more than he did, on a fraction of the hours.
So he set up on the platform almost everybody was ignoring at the time, which was LinkedIn.
He posted day in and day out.
Some of it landed and some of it went nowhere, and he couldn’t tell in advance which would be which.
In six months he had an audience of more than twenty thousand people.
His own account of those months has two steps.
First, make a lot of noise.
Then go back through it and find the signals, the few pieces that were received far better than the rest.
His business is now past $10 million in revenue,built almost entirely on what he wrote and published.
And the instruction he gives beginners is exact:
“If you’re starting out and not sure which types your followers will respond best to, I suggest rotating between 5-7 types to discover your sweet spot.”
His own list runs to about ten types.
A list post, something he noticed, an X versus Y comparison, a contrarian take, a customer’s result, and so on.
Get this — he isn’t saying rotate so you reach more kinds of people.
He’s saying rotate because you do not yet know which kind would work with your readers.
The rotation isn’t a content strategy.
It’s a test, and you stop when one kind clearly works.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Sweet Spot Rotation
Justin posted every day for six months and watched which posts worked,
and by the end he had an audience of more than twenty thousand people.
Justin tells beginners to rotate five to seven kinds of post to find their sweet spot.
This approach is called The Sweet Spot Rotation.
He didn’t decide in advance what would work.
He ran the whole range in front of a real audience and let the audience answer.
That’s the only way to find out which kind of post works.
So you stop guessing which format would work with your readers.
Five weeks of posting tells you what a year of guessing would not.
Your AI sidekick can draft the same idea in seven formats in a few minutes, so testing them costs you a week, not a month.
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🛠️ Ethan’s turn
Now, back to Ethan, who writes the same long how-to every week and blames his topic for the flat numbers.
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it the one kind of issue he keeps writing.
His AI sidekick doesn’t waste words:
Keep your topic the same, and write a different kind of issue each week for five weeks,
so you can see whether the format was the problem.
That Sunday, instead of the long how-to,
he sends a short list of the mistakes he made in his first month as a product manager.
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🌅 Six weeks later
Ethan has sent five different kinds of issue, all on the same topic.
The short list got more replies than any how-to he ever wrote,
so it’s his main format now.
He still tries one new kind of issue every month.
Flat numbers don’t always mean your topic is wrong.
Try five to seven kinds of post, and let your readers pick the one that works.
That’s it, my fellow outliers!
Yours ‘showing you that building a business is fun, not a drain’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below builds your rotation — five formats, your topic, five weeks — and tells you
what to watch for so the test actually settles something.
🧰 What you’ll need
Your topic, and the one kind of issue you keep writing
- Your topic stays the same for all five weeks. Only the kind of issue changes.
- e.g. your first year as a product manager, always a long how-to with numbered stepsWhere you publish, how often, and what has happened so far
- Be honest about the numbers.
- e.g. my newsletter, every Sunday, about 40 opens, two replies, nobody has ever written back twiceWhat you would refuse to publish
- e.g. anything with a photo of my face, or a “day in the life” video
🚀 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 first-time product managers.
- 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.
- Hold the topic fixed across all five. Only the FORMAT changes, or the test proves nothing.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
My topic, which does not change, and the one kind of issue I keep writing:
{e.g. your first year as a product manager, always a long how-to with numbered steps}
Where I publish, how often, and what has happened so far, honestly:
{e.g. my newsletter, every Sunday, about 40 opens, two replies, nobody has ever written back twice}
What I would refuse to publish:
{e.g. anything with a photo of my face, or a "day in the life" video}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. My five formats — chosen from the ten kinds of post Justin Welsh uses, minus anything I said I would refuse, with one line on why each might suit my topic.
2. The five posts — an actual opening line and shape for each, all on my fixed topic.
3. The order — which week gets which, putting the least comfortable one third rather than last, so I do not quit before reaching it.
4. What counts as a signal — the specific reader behavior that means a format landed, and why likes are not it.
5. The stop rule — what I need to see before I stop rotating and commit, stated as a number and a date.
Then tell me which of the five I am most likely to skip, and why that is probably the one to run first.