Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Ruby’s sixth module
Ruby is a content strategist who runs a course on writing for LinkedIn on the side.
She just added a sixth module to her course.
The course already covered everything.
But to Ruby, a short course feels like she did not work hard enough on it.
So every month it gets one more module and a few more lessons.
Then she looks at the numbers, and almost nobody finishes module two.
🧩 Her struggle:
She judges her course by how much is in it, so every new module makes it harder to finish.
Over lunch, a designer on her team tells her the real story of a woman
who also watched people give up on something too hard to learn,
and built a company now worth $42 billion.
And her company started in her mother’s living room.
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🎨 The nineteen-year-old who watched people struggle
Melanie Perkins was a nineteen-year-old university student in Perth, Australia.
She tutored other students on design software like Photoshop and InDesign.
She watched smart people spend months on the software without getting any better at design.
They spent those months learning where the buttons were.
She saw this happen every semester.
The companies that made design software competed on power: more tools and more features in every release.
Every release added tools, and every release took just as many months to learn.
Almost no company was trying to be the easy one, because easy sounded like a cheap product.
Melanie decided the hard part wasn’t design itself.
The hard part was learning the software.
So in 2007 she and her boyfriend, Cliff Obrecht, built a small online tool for one narrow job: school yearbooks.
Students picked a template, dragged photos and text into it, and were done.
They ran it from her mother’s living room and sold it to schools across Australia.
In 2013 they launched the same idea for any design job, and called it Canva.
Get this — more than 200 million people now use it, and investors valued it at $42 billion.
Forbes, the business magazine, puts her personal net worth at $7.6 billion.
Canva was never more powerful than Photoshop or InDesign, the professional tools from Adobe.
But a person with no training could open Canva and finish a poster the same afternoon.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Simplicity Edge
Melanie replaced months of learning where the buttons were with a template you drop photos and text into,
and more than 200 million people use it.
This move is called The Simplicity Edge.
She didn’t make a weaker product.
She took out the hard part a person had to get through first: the months of learning where the buttons were.
Nobody got anything out of learning where the buttons were, so cutting that part lost nothing.
So you stop trying to cover more than every other course in your niche,
and you cut the part people have to get through before they get anything useful.
People finish the course that gets them to the useful part quickly.
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🛠️ Ruby’s turn
Now, back to Ruby, who keeps adding modules to a course that almost nobody finishes.
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what her students say when they stop halfway.
Her AI sidekick doesn’t waste words:
Your students only ever ask about the post templates, so cut the course down to the templates.
That weekend, she cuts four of her six modules.
The post templates are now the first lesson.
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🌅 Two months later
Ruby’s course has two modules now.
Most of her students get to the end,
and some of them send her the first LinkedIn post they wrote with her templates.
Your course or newsletter probably has a hard part that people have to get through before they get anything useful.
Take out the part of your course that people have to learn before they can make anything.
That’s it, my fellow outliers!
Yours ‘helping you build profitable businesses 25x faster’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds the part of your course that people have to get through before they get anything useful, and cuts it.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you make, for whom, and everything you currently put in it
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. a course on writing LinkedIn posts for mid-career professionals, with six modules, a workbook, a template library and a reading listThe one thing a learner would actually use this week, and what people say when they don’t finish
- e.g. the post templates, because people only ever mention the templates, and two people said they saved the course for later and never came backWhat everybody else in your space does
- e.g. long, comprehensive, every angle covered, a lot of research citations
🚀 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 mid-career professionals who want to write better LinkedIn posts.
- 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.
- Do not suggest adding anything. Every recommendation must be a removal, a merge, or a replacement with something smaller.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I make, for whom, and everything I currently include in it:
{e.g. a course on writing LinkedIn posts for mid-career professionals, with six modules, a workbook, a template library and a reading list}
The one thing a learner would actually use this week, and what people say when they do not finish it:
{e.g. the post templates, because people only ever mention the templates, and two people said they saved the course for later and never came back}
What everybody else in my space does:
{e.g. long, comprehensive, every angle covered, a lot of research citations}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The work before the benefit — everything a learner has to get through before they get anything useful, listed plainly.
2. The one number — if I had to replace my whole thing with one score, one rule, or one sentence, what would it be.
3. What to cut this week — three specific removals, each with what I lose and what I gain.
4. The simpler version — my thing rewritten so the useful part arrives first and the rest is gone.
5. The honest objection — the strongest argument that a removal makes it worse, stated fairly rather than dismissed.
Then tell me the single thing to remove from my course this week.