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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Brooke runs a YouTube channel about baking bread the old-fashioned way.
Each week she bakes a bread from history, like a rye loaf people ate in the 1800s.
She started it the year she got tired of the bland, factory-made bread at the store.
And her viewers? They want real bread that takes time and care, the way it used to be made.
⛳️ Problem:
Two years in, Brooke has 30,000 people watching her, but nothing she can sell them.
Every comment, message, and friend keeps telling her the same thing: launch a paid course.
So she spends her weekends sketching out lessons for a big 500-dollar course.
Three drafts later, she still hasn't finished it or sold a single thing.
Her struggle:
She can't figure out which paid course her viewers would actually buy.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Listening Loop
Justin Welsh runs a one-person business that has made over 10 million dollars.
Wild, right? He never once guessed at what to sell.
Before all this, he spent years as the head of sales at a software company, until burnout pushed him out.
When he started fresh on his own in 2019, he didn't rush to build a product.
Instead, he just wrote online every day, for free, about the work he knew best.
As he wrote, he paid close attention to which posts people loved and replied to.
He noticed the exact questions they kept asking him, over and over.
Only then did he build his first paid courses — on the very topics people begged him for.
Because he listened first, those courses weren't a gamble.
He has now sold more than 3 million dollars of them, all built from what his audience asked for.
His lesson is simple. Don't guess what to sell.
Give people something helpful for free,
listen closely to what they want more of,
then build exactly that.
🚗 So Brooke tried it her way.
Remember Brooke and her old-fashioned bread-baking channel?
She had 30,000 viewers, but no idea what to sell them.
So she decided to stop guessing, and let her audience tell her instead.
Spoiler: her audience knew exactly what they wanted.
First, she made one small free gift to pull in her most interested viewers.
She wrote a simple one-page guide called "The 300-Year-Old Sourdough Starter."
It showed the exact flour, water, and timing to make a bread starter the old way.
She pinned it under her videos, and 420 people downloaded it in two weeks.
Then, instead of guessing, she asked those people what they wanted.
She sent them four quick questions about what they cooked and what they struggled with.
Ninety of them wrote back with clear answers.
Turns out — most of them wanted the same thing: guided lessons on old medieval breads.
So that's exactly what she built — a small 59-dollar course walking them through six of those loaves.
So she braced for silence and hit send.
She emailed the ninety people first, and seventeen of them bought it on the very first day.
Boom. Her first offer landed on day one.
🧸 Don't guess what to sell. Ask your readers, then build the thing they asked for.
The prompt below turns one free gift plus one short survey into your first paid offer.
You just tell it what you make and what your viewers said.
🏄♀️ 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 inbox or survey tool directly, pull the raw answers from there. Otherwise, use what I paste below.
Inputs:
The wide problem I help with (the big, messy outcome my viewers want — not the tiny one):
{e.g. help home cooks bring historical bread recipes back to their modern kitchens}
My lead magnet idea (the one tiny free thing I can ship this week that solves a narrow piece of that problem):
{e.g. a one-page "300-Year Sourdough Starter Guide" — exact flour, water, and timing from 1720}
My survey results (the raw answers from the 4-question survey, multiple choice and open text — paste them if you can't see my inbox or survey tool):
{e.g. 58% love medieval breads, 71% say "I can't find authentic ingredients," 64% cook from history twice a month, word cloud: "guided, simple, authentic"}
For Audience: {e.g. YouTube viewers who love historical cooking and want guided cook-alongs with modern-pantry substitutes}
For Outcome: {e.g. one paid offer the survey is clearly pointing to — name, price, format, promise, and a 100-word pitch}
Outputs:
1. Audience summary — in one paragraph, who the survey reveals my real viewer to be.
2. The dream solution words — the three words they used most for what they want.
3. The offer — name, price, format (course / template / mini-coaching), and what it promises.
4. The 100-word pitch — written in my voice, ready to email to the survey-takers.
5. The pre-sale email — one short message to send to survey-takers to gauge real demand before I build.
Then name the ONE thing in the survey I'm tempted to ignore but shouldn't.
That's it, my fellow renegades!
Yours 'helping you borrow the shortcuts from people who already made it' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️