Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Nora’s product nobody asked for
Nora is a UX designer who runs a YouTube channel on the side, teaching design to non-designers.
She’s three weeks into building a product for her viewers, and she guessed what they wanted.
Three more weeks and it will be done, and only then will she find out whether she guessed right.
🧩 Her struggle:
She builds from a guess instead of from what her viewers already ask her,
so six weeks of work could go to something nobody wants.
On her lunch break, she reads a LinkedIn post that tells the real story of a man
who also had people following his work and nothing to sell them yet,
and whose first $50 product made $10,482 in its first month.
And the thing he sold was pretty rough.
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📄 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.
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 were asking him for.
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.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ Watch, Don’t Guess
Justin noticed the question people kept asking him and turned his answer into a $50 course,
and it made $10,482 in its first month.
This hack is called Watch, Don’t Guess.
He didn’t invent anything.
He watched what people asked him for, and sold them the answer.
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.
Your AI sidekick can read a hundred forum threads and list the complaints in minutes.
Sell what an AI answer can’t give them.
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🛠️ Nora’s turn
Remember Nora, and the product for her YouTube viewers that she’s building from a guess?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it the questions her viewers keep leaving in her comments.
The reply from her AI sidekick is short:
Your viewers keep asking which fonts go well together,
so your product is the list of font pairs you already use at work.
She stops building the product she guessed at that night.
That weekend, she cleans up her font list and puts it on sale.
At the end of her next video, she tells her viewers it exists.
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🌅 Two months later
Nora reads her comments differently now.
Every question that shows up twice goes on a list,
and that list tells her what to make next.
The product she guessed at is still on hold, and she doesn’t miss it.
Your viewers or readers are probably asking you for something already.
Put a price on the answer people keep asking you for, before you build anything new.
That’s it, my fellow trailblazers!
Yours ‘helping you build an AI sidekick that works and makes money while you enjoy life’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ 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.
🧰 What you’ll need
Questions people have actually asked you lately, in their own words
- Copy them from your comments, messages, or replies.
- e.g. “what font should I use with this”, “how do you pick colors”, “can you just send me your checklist”Things you already make for yourself every week, that nobody sees
- e.g. a list of font pairs I use at work, a checklist I run before I send any designWhat you were about to go and build instead
- e.g. a six-module course on design basics
🚀 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 video list, my analytics, or my drafts, 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 who aren't designers but need their slides, flyers, and posts to look good.
- 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.
- 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 font should I use with this", "how do you pick colors", "can you just send me your checklist"}
Things I already make for myself every week, that nobody sees:
{e.g. a list of font pairs I use at work, a checklist I run before I send any design}
What I was about to go and build instead:
{e.g. a six-module course on design basics}
======================== 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.