Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🎤 The phone call the night before
The night before Elvis Presley was booked to record her song, Dolly Parton's phone rang.
It was his manager, Colonel Tom Parker.
Elvis could record "I Will Always Love You" — but only if Dolly handed over half the publishing rights.
Publishing rights are ownership of the song itself.
Whoever holds them gets paid every time it's recorded, played on the radio, or used in a film.
So the deal was simple.
The biggest singer alive would sing her song, and in return she'd give away half of everything it ever earned.
She said no.
She's said it broke her heart, and that it was the most important song she owned.
Elvis never recorded it.
Ouch.
The story usually stops there.
Most of us know that song as Whitney Houston's.
Whitney sang it for The Bodyguard in 1992 and it became one of the best-selling singles ever made.
But Dolly wrote it, and Dolly still owned it.
Get this — every radio play, every copy, every film that used it paid her.
It still does.
She gave up one enormous night to keep something that pays for a lifetime.
⛳️ The problem
Dolly kept the song, and it's paid her ever since.
But for us, everything we earn stops the moment we stop working.
💻 The designer who wrote down what he already knew
Nathan Barry finished a client project, sent the invoice, and watched his income stop with it.
He was a freelance designer, and he was good, and he was paid by the hour.
So the deal was always the same.
Work an hour, get paid once.
He could raise his rate.
He could not add hours to a day.
So he wrote down the things he already explained to clients over and over, and sold it as a book about designing apps.
Not new material.
Just the answers he was giving away one client at a time anyway.
He wrote it once.
People kept buying it.
Turns out he wrote more of them, and at its best that book business paid him between $200,000 and $250,000 a year.
It kept paying whether or not he was working that week.
Then he built something bigger.
ConvertKit, now called Kit, is email software for creators, and it brings in more than $40 million a year.
Forty million a year.
He did not find more hours.
He changed what he was selling.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Own What Keeps Paying
Dolly gave up having Elvis record her song, and kept owning it instead.
Nathan wrote down the advice he'd already given away one client at a time.
Neither of them worked more hours to get there.
They both stopped renting out their time and started owning the thing the time produced.
So you stop selling hours and start selling work you made once.
The answer you keep repeating is the product.
It keeps paying on the weeks you don't wanna work at all.
Say no to Elvis.
That's it, my fellow renegades!
Yours 'helping you borrow the shortcuts from people who already made it' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds the thing you already repeat and turns it into something you own.
You just tell it what you keep explaining.
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.
- If you can see my sent messages or documents directly, find what I explain repeatedly. Otherwise, use what I paste below.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I explain over and over, to different people:
{e.g. how to run a one-to-one with someone who used to be your teammate}
How I currently get paid, and what happens when I stop:
{e.g. hourly consulting, about $90 an hour, and it stops the week I stop}
What I already have written down somewhere, however rough:
{e.g. a checklist in Notes, four long emails I have basically sent twice}
What I would want to still be earning from in two years:
{e.g. something that does not need me on a call}
For Audience: {e.g. first-time managers who inherited their old team}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. What I already repeat — the two or three things I explain most often, in my words.
2. The next step up — the same work sold as one fixed package at one price, and what that price is.
3. The step above that — the smallest thing I could make once, from what I already repeat.
4. What already exists — which of my rough notes and emails is 60% of that product already.
5. What I keep — what I should own outright rather than hand over, and why it matters later.
Then name the ONE thing I have explained more than five times and have never written down.