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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🧼 The wallpaper cleaner that would not sell
Kay Zufall ran a nursery school in New Jersey.
Back then, homes were heated by burning coal, which left black soot on the walls.
Wallpaper cleaner was a soft doughy putty you rolled over the wallpaper, and the soot stuck to it came away.
Kay had read that you could make holiday decorations out of it, so she bought some at the hardware store.
She handed this lump of wallpaper cleaner to a room of four-year-olds and watched what they did with it.
They didn't clean anything.
They squashed it, rolled it, and made things out of it, and they loved it.
Kutol, a company in Cincinnati, Ohio, made that wallpaper cleaner, and it worked exactly as intended.
Then homes stopped burning coal, the walls stopped getting sooty, and nobody needed it anymore.
The company was quietly dying.
Kay's brother-in-law, Joe McVicker, ran Kutol, so she went and told him what she'd watched happen.
His team took the same dough, took out the detergent, added color, and sold it as a toy.
They wanted to call it Rainbow Modeling Compound.
Kay and her husband came up with the name Play-Doh instead, and gave it to Joe for free.
Get this — by 1964 Kutol was selling more than a million cans a year, and Kay never made a cent from the name.
Nobody invented a new product.
A teacher watched some four-year-olds, reported back, and didn't ask for anything in return.
⛳️ The problem
Kay did not invent a product, she watched what people were already doing with one, and told the company.
These days, we are three weeks into building a product for our YouTube viewers, and we guessed what they wanted.
Nobody asked for it, but we were sure our viewers would like it.
Three more weeks and it will be done, and only then will we find out whether we guessed right.
So we finish it, launch it, and nine people buy it.
Kay never guessed, she watched a room of four-year-olds play with the dough, and the product was already there.
There is a simple habit that tells you what to sell before you build anything.
It starts with watching what people already ask you for.
A former sales executive did it with a $50 file that took him an afternoon, and it made $10,482, so meet Justin.
📄 A fifty-dollar file
Justin Welsh, a former sales executive who'd just left corporate life, had been writing on LinkedIn every day for months.
People kept asking him how he did it.
So he wrote down the answer and charged $50 for it.
It wasn't polished.
It was a rough, homemade course called The LinkedIn Playbook, made of a few videos and PDFs.
He shared it like he was explaining it to a friend, and this was April 2020.
He put it on Gumroad, a site where anyone can sell a digital file directly to buyers, and told his followers it existed.
It made $10,482 in the first month.
He did the same thing again later, in an even smaller way.
Every week he was already building content templates for himself, to save his own time.
He wondered whether anyone else would want those, so he offered them for $9 alongside what he was already selling.
Turns out he didn't run a survey or plan a launch.
He noticed something that was already happening and put a price on it.
He created many more products like these by watching what people wanted and were asking.
The one-person business he built has since crossed $10 million in revenue.
He did it in nearly six years, with no employees and no paid ads.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Watch, Don't Guess
Kay watched four-year-olds squash wallpaper cleaner, told Kutol what she saw, and helped name what they made: Play-Doh.
Justin noticed the question people kept asking him and turned his answer into a $50 course.
This hack is called Watch, Don't Guess.
Neither of them invented anything.
Kay watched and reported what she saw.
Justin watched and sold what he saw.
So you stop inventing videos, courses, or products nobody asked for.
If you already have readers, what they want is in the questions they keep asking you.
If you don't have readers yet, it's in the forums and subreddits where your future readers already hang out, complaining about what's missing.
Watch, don't guess.
That's it, my fellow trailblazers!
Yours 'helping you build an AI sidekick that works and makes money while you enjoy life' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds your product in things people have already said to you.
You just paste what is already in your messages.
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use your own files if it can see them, and the example values if it cannot.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my video list, my analytics, or my drafts, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- 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 assume people starting their first side project after work.
- Anything I leave as an example, treat as real. Anything I delete, fill in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption.
- If you can see my inbox, comments or DMs directly, pull the real questions from there. Otherwise, use what I paste below.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Questions people have actually asked me lately, in their words:
{e.g. "what camera do you use", "how do you find time", "can you just send me your checklist"}
Things I already make for myself every week, that nobody sees:
{e.g. a planning spreadsheet, a swipe file of openings I like}
What I was about to go and build instead:
{e.g. a six-module course on personal branding}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The repeated question — the one thing that came up more than once, in their exact words.
2. The thing I already made — which of my own private files is closest to answering it.
3. The $50 version — the smallest document I could sell this week, and what goes in it.
4. The $9 version — an even smaller test, if the $50 one still feels too big.
5. What to drop — why the thing I was about to build is the expensive way to find this out.
Then name the ONE question people keep asking me that I have never charged a cent to answer.