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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🙋♂️ Nate’s thirty-one things
Nate is a software engineer who runs a podcast on the side.
His to-do list for growing the show has thirty-one ideas on it.
Every one feels too good to delete, so he keeps them all.
He never gets through the list, and the podcast hasn’t grown in a month.
His struggle:
He can’t tell which ideas actually grow the show, so he tries to do all thirty-one.
On a walk, he’s listening to a podcast that tells the real story of a former sales executive
who also had more to do than he could ever finish,
and still built a $10 million business with no employees.
One person, ten million dollars.
Wait, how?
💼 The business with no employees
Justin Welsh walked away from a job most people spend a career climbing toward.
He’d been a vice president of sales, then a chief revenue officer.
He ran big sales teams with big targets.
The last one was at a fast-growing startup in Los Angeles, and the stress built up month after month.
In December 2018, the stress ended in a massive panic attack.
He later called it one of the worst days of his life.
He was 38, and the year was 2019.
His parents couldn’t understand why anyone would leave a job like that.
Then he started a one-person business teaching people to build one-person businesses.
And then he did the odd part.
He kept it a one-person business.
No employees.
No ads.
Now watch.
When new work shows up, his first move is never to find time for it.
It’s to ask whether it needs doing at all.
Turns out most of it doesn’t.
Every week, he opens his calendar and asks one question about each item:
“Does this move me closer to my most important goals?”
If the answer is no, it goes.
That means meetings he shouldn’t have booked, podcasts he doesn’t need to be on,
and favors for friends of friends.
He even pays a freelance assistant, a contractor, not an employee,
to turn down most requests for his time.
Whatever survived that question, he either automated it or paid a freelancer to do it for an afternoon.
He never built a team, because he deleted the pointless work before there was enough of it to need a team.
That business has crossed $10 million in total revenue in under six years, at roughly ninety cents of profit on every dollar.
He did not get better at doing the work.
He got better at not doing it.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Delete Before Delegate
Justin runs a business past $10 million in total revenue with no employees.
This strategy is called Delete Before Delegate.
You delete the work that doesn’t need doing, before you hand anything to someone else.
Most people avoid deleting work.
He did it first, and only then dealt with what was left.
So before you find time for a task, you ask whether it needs doing at all.
Most of the work on your list disappears at that first question.
Only what survives gets automated, handed to somebody else or done by him.
Now that AI can automate almost anything, deleting first matters more.
Don’t automate work that never needed doing.
🛠️ Nate’s turn
Back to Nate and his thirty-one ideas for growing the podcast.
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it the whole list.
His AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Twenty-three of your thirty-one ideas don’t need doing at all.
He deletes all twenty-three that night.
Eight things are left on the list.
By Friday, he’s finished all eight.
🌅 Three months later
Before anything goes on Nate’s list now, he asks whether it needs doing at all.
He’s put out an episode every week,
and three hundred people listen to the show now.
Your list probably has a few things on it that never needed doing.
Cross one off before you find time for it.
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 goes through your real week and finds the work you can stop doing.
🧰 What you’ll need
Everything you actually spent time on last week
- However small. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. rewrote my about page, answered 40 comments, redesigned my logo, recorded one episode, tidied my NotionWhat actually grew your show in the last month
- As far as you can tell.
- e.g. the one episode people replied to, and a comment thread that got me two listenersHow many hours a week you genuinely have for this
- e.g. about six, mostly evenings
🚀 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 calendar, task list, or notes, pull last week's real entries 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 learning to code after thirty.
- 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.
- Work out for yourself which tasks I am likely trying to hand off or automate. Do not ask me for that list.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Everything I actually spent time on last week, however small:
{e.g. rewrote my about page, answered 40 comments, redesigned my logo, recorded one episode, tidied my Notion}
What actually grew the show in the last month, as far as I can tell:
{e.g. the one episode people replied to, and a comment thread that got me two listeners}
How many hours a week I genuinely have for this:
{e.g. about six, mostly evenings}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. Delete — the tasks that should not exist at all, and what happens if I simply stop. Be blunt.
2. Later — what is real but not now, with the month I should revisit it.
3. Automate — only what survived steps 1 and 2, and the tool that would do it.
4. Hand off — what is left, and the smallest way to pay someone else to do it.
5. What I am left with — the short list that actually grows the show, and the hours it needs.
Then name the ONE task I have been trying to speed up that I should have deleted months ago.