Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Nate’s best episode that he can’t repeat
Nate is a software engineer with a podcast for people learning to code after 30.
One of his episodes, on choosing a first coding language, got three times as many downloads as any other.
So he recorded another episode on the same topic.
It flopped, and so did the one after that.
🧩 His struggle:
He copies the topic of his best episode, so he misses what made it work.
At lunch, he’s watching a video that tells the true story of a YouTuber
whose early videos also got ordinary numbers, except for one,
and whose company is now worth $5 billion.
And what he did in that video sounds really boring.
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📈 The forty hours in a chair
In January 2017, Jimmy Donaldson sat down in front of a camera and said every number from one to one hundred thousand.
He publishes on YouTube as MrBeast.
He said one, two, three, out loud, in order, all the way up.
It took him about forty hours.
Everything he had posted before that was ordinary, and got ordinary numbers.
This one got tens of thousands of views in a few days, and then kept climbing.
Nothing else on his channel came close.
Now look at what he made next.
He filmed himself watching paint dry for an hour.
He tried to spin a fidget spinner for twenty-four hours straight.
He tried to shatter a pane of glass with a hundred megaphones.
Not one of those has anything to do with counting.
Turns out the numbers were never the reason that video worked.
He dropped them, and kept everything else about it.
Every one of those videos kept four things from the counting video.
There was one person on camera.
He did one pointless task.
He pushed it to a ridiculous extreme.
And he filmed it without stopping.
He says he watches which of his own videos do best.
As he told an interviewer: “What do people want to see?”
Brands pay to put their products inside those videos, and that money is one of the main ways the channel earns.
Those videos grew into a company called Beast Industries.
Get this — in January 2026 a crypto company called Bitmine paid $200 million for a stake in it.
That deal valued Beast Industries at $5 billion.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Outlier Method
Jimmy kept everything about his one big video except the counting,
and the videos he made that way grew into a company worth $5 billion.
What he did has a name: The Outlier Method.
An outlier is the one thing you made, like a YouTube video or a newsletter article, that did far better than everything else you made.
It could also be a video or article by somebody else, which did far better than everything around it.
Either way, you do the same two things.
First, you ignore almost everything you have made, and pick the two or three that did far better than the rest.
Then you put those few side by side and ask what is the same about all of them.
What they share is the pattern.
Everything else, including the subject, you throw away.
Jimmy made one video that beat everything else on his channel.
Every video after it used the same four things:
one person, one pointless task, a ridiculous extreme, and a camera that never stops.
He didn’t copy what his counting video was about.
Watching paint dry is not about counting.
So you stop guessing what to publish next, and you stop writing about last month’s topic again.
You get one pattern that works on subjects you have never touched.
Paste your top three pieces into your AI sidekick and ask what they have in common.
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🛠️ Nate’s turn
Remember Nate, whose podcast episode on choosing a first coding language got three times the downloads,
and whose next two episodes on the same topic flopped?
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it his best episode and the two that flopped after it.
The reply from his AI sidekick is short:
Your best episode worked because it opened with the week you almost gave up on coding,
not because it was about choosing a first coding language.
He picks a topic he has never covered before, how to read an error message.
He opens the episode with the night one error message almost made him quit.
He records it that weekend.
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🌅 Ten weeks later
Nate has put out ten new episodes, each on a topic he had never covered.
Every one opens with a moment when he almost gave up on coding.
Three of them got more downloads than his old best episode.
Your best piece of work probably didn’t do well because of its topic.
Copy how your best piece of work was made, not what it was about.
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 the outliers in what you have already published and extracts the pattern you can reuse.
🧰 What you’ll need
The pieces that did far better than normal, and your normal numbers
- Downloads, views, opens, or replies, whatever you track.
- e.g. the one on choosing a first coding language, which opened with the week I almost quit, against a normal of 300 downloads and one replyThe pieces you expected to do well that did not, and what you were going to make next
- e.g. the two follow-up episodes about coding languages, and I was going to make another one, this time on choosing a laptop for codingOutliers you admire from other people in your space
- e.g. one episode about quitting a coding bootcamp, and a post that was just a screenshot of a first job offer
🚀 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 episode list, my show notes, or my download numbers, 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 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.
- Never recommend repeating a topic. Every recommendation must be about the pattern: the opening, the promise, the order, the turn, the ending.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
My pieces that did far better than normal, and my normal numbers, so we can see what far better means:
{e.g. the one on choosing a first coding language, which opened with the week I almost quit, against a normal of 300 downloads and one reply}
Pieces I expected to do well and did not, and what I was going to make next:
{e.g. the two follow-up episodes about coding languages, and I was going to make another one, this time on choosing a laptop for coding}
Outliers I admire from other people in my space:
{e.g. one episode about quitting a coding bootcamp, and a post that was just a screenshot of a first job offer}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The real outliers — which pieces genuinely beat my normal by a wide margin, and which were noise.
2. The pattern — what those pieces have in common, described so I could rebuild it on any subject.
3. What it is NOT — the topic-level similarities I might mistake for the cause.
4. Five new pieces — the same pattern applied to five subjects I have never covered.
5. The test — what to watch after publishing, to know whether the pattern or the subject did the work.
Then tell me which of my failed pieces would have worked in that pattern.