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Hey there rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Cara writes a weekly newsletter about real Mexican home cooking.
She started it to rescue taco night from those bland, store-bought seasoning packets.
She's sure real Mexican food is weeknight-simple, once someone shows you.
Cara's readers are mostly Americans, tired of bland tacos and hungry for the real thing.
⛳️ Problem:
Cara makes a little from sponsor shoutouts and one-off cooking workshops.
But each one means another pitch, another live session, another draining week.
A year in, she's busy every single week, and the money never builds on itself. Yikes.
Her struggle:
Every dollar costs her an hour, so the day she stops working, the money stops too.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The ladder of wealth creation
Think of a ladder you climb to earn.
On the bottom rung, you trade one hour for one dollar — stop, and the money stops.
Each rung up keeps paying you, even while you sleep.
Turns out one rung can pay you forever.
That's the ladder Nathan Barry mapped out.
He founded ConvertKit, an email platform that now makes around $40 million a year.
He climbed there himself — freelance design, then $250,000 in ebooks in a year, then the company.
His take: most of us get stuck on that bottom rung, trading time for money forever.
For a one-person business, three rungs matter most.
Trade your time, then sell one fixed package, then build a product you make once.
You don't leap to the top. You climb one rung at a time.
And each rung you reach keeps paying you, long after the work is done.
🚗 So Cara tried it her way.
Remember Cara and her newsletter on real Mexican home cooking?
Every dollar she made came from a live workshop or a sponsor call — the bottom rung.
So she started climbing, one rung at a time.
Wild, right? She'd been stuck on the bottom rung the whole time.
First, she took the scattered workshops she taught over and over.
She turned them into one "Taco Night Bootcamp" — set lessons, set price, same four sessions each time. Multiple people can join.
Now she was selling a package, not just her hours.
Then she climbed one more rung: she filmed that bootcamp once.
It became a $39 self-paced course, living on her site for anyone to buy.
Plot twist: she almost forgot the course even existed.
It sold on a Tuesday while she stood at the farmers market, doing nothing.
The same cooking skill she always had — finally sold in a way that keeps paying.
Cha-ching.
🧸 Don't trade hours forever. Climb from your time, to a package, to a product that pays while you sleep.
The prompt below maps your rungs and the next one to climb.
You just tell it how you earn today and the skill behind it.
🏄♀️ The prompt
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Update your input values in the prompt, or just run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use the example values and give you an output.
CONTEXT:
- (use what's available, fall back to the inline values)
- 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, use the audience below.
Inputs:
How I earn from my work today (every income source, and whether each one costs me hours):
{e.g. sponsor shoutouts (a pitch each time), live cooking workshops (an evening each), a small Patreon with monthly live Q&As}
The skill I keep delivering over and over (the thing people pay me for, that I repeat each time):
{e.g. teaching beginners to cook real Mexican food from scratch — same lessons every workshop}
My audience (rough size + how they found me):
{e.g. ~3,000 newsletter readers, mostly from Pinterest and word of mouth}
For Outcome: {e.g. a map of which rung I'm on and the exact next product to build}
Outputs:
1. My current rung — name which one (time-for-money / services / productized service / products) most of my income comes from today.
2. The productized version — how to take the service I repeat live and turn it into one fixed package with a set price.
3. The first real product — the one thing I could make once and sell many times, built from what I already teach. Name it, price it, describe it in 3 lines.
4. The climb plan — the order to move up the rungs over the next 90 days without dropping the income I have now.
Then name the ONE time-for-money task I should stop saying yes to, so I have room to build the product.
That's it, my fellow trailblazers!
Yours 'helping you build an AI sidekick that works and makes money while you enjoy life' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️