Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Ruby’s course that only sells when she posts about it
Ruby is a content strategist who sells a course on writing for LinkedIn on the side.
It only sells in the weeks she posts about it.
So she posts about it every week, and every week it feels a little more pushy.
The week she’s too tired to post, nobody buys.
🧩 Her struggle:
Her course only sells when she pushes it, so the selling never works without her.
Then, in a newsletter she subscribes to, she reads the true story of a man
who solved the same problem: his products sell without him pushing them.
He made $10 million in revenue, working alone.
So where does all that money come from?
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📨 The line at the bottom of the email
Justin Welsh writes a newsletter to more than 200,000 people and never launches anything.
No countdown.
No launch week.
No “sale ends at midnight” deadline.
His one-person business has passed $10 million in revenue with no employees.
For most solo creators, not launching sounds like throwing sales away, because launching is the only selling they know.
Build the product, post about it all week, then stop, and watch sales drop to zero.
What Justin does instead is almost boring.
At the bottom of every issue of his newsletter, The Saturday Essay, sits one soft line linking to one of his courses.
Not “buy now.”
Closer to a friend mentioning a book they liked.
Anyone who clicks that link and doesn’t buy gets three short emails over the following week.
Each one is a small story.
The last one tells them he won’t bring it up again.
He wrote that line once.
He wrote those three emails once.
They’ve been selling ever since, on the weeks he’s writing and the weeks he’s doing nothing at all.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Passive-Sell Flywheel
One soft line at the bottom of every issue does the selling for Justin.
This strategy is called The Passive-Sell Flywheel.
A flywheel is a heavy wheel that keeps spinning on its own once you’ve pushed it.
He wasn’t selling harder than the rest of us.
He did the selling once, on purpose,
and then put it at the bottom of the newsletter his readers already open every week.
So you write the selling once, and it keeps working on the weeks you don’t.
You make money on the weeks you do nothing.
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🛠️ Ruby’s turn
So what about Ruby, whose LinkedIn writing course only sells in the weeks she posts about it?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email,
and tells it about the free writing tip she posts on LinkedIn every Tuesday.
Her AI sidekick says:
Write one soft line about your course, once, and put it under every writing tip you already post.
She writes the line that night.
On Tuesday, it goes under her usual writing tip.
She doesn’t write a single post about the course that week.
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🌅 Six months later
Ruby hasn’t written a post about her course since.
The line sits under every tip she posts.
Most weeks, a few readers click it and write back with questions about the course,
even the week she was on vacation.
Your course doesn’t need a louder post every week.
It needs one quiet line, written once.
Write one soft line about your course, and put it under everything you already post.
That’s it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours ‘proving one person with an AI sidekick can build something amazingly big’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below writes the quiet line and the three follow-up emails — the whole thing
you build once and never touch again.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you sell, the price, and one true, small number about it
- e.g. a $99 course on writing for LinkedIn, and 312 people have taken itWhere your work already goes, every time
- e.g. the bottom of my weekly LinkedIn writing tipWhat people say right before they buy, and why someone would click and then not buy
- e.g. “I have ideas, but I freeze every time I have to post”, and they think their job is too boring to write about
🚀 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 course outline, my lesson drafts, or my sales page, 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 with a day job who want to write better posts on LinkedIn.
- 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.
- Nothing you write may use urgency, scarcity, countdowns or "limited spots". If it would not survive being read every week for a year, it is wrong.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I sell, the price, and one true, small number about it:
{e.g. a $99 course on writing for LinkedIn, and 312 people have taken it}
Where my work already goes, every time:
{e.g. the bottom of my weekly LinkedIn writing tip}
What people say right before they buy, and why someone would click and then not buy:
{e.g. "I have ideas, but I freeze every time I have to post", and they think their job is too boring to write about}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The permanent line — one or two sentences, in my voice, that I could put at the bottom of every issue for a year without wincing.
2. Three variations of it — same promise, different wording, so I can swap them without rebuilding anything.
3. The three follow-up emails — subject line and body for each, each carrying one small story, the third one saying I will not bring it up again.
4. Where else it goes — every place my work already appears that should carry the same line, listed.
5. What to delete — anything in my current selling that only works during a launch week.
Then tell me the ONE sentence to put at the bottom of the very next thing I publish.