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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🙋♀️ Ruby’s income that stops when she does
Ruby is a content strategist who runs one-on-one coaching calls on the side, teaching people to write on LinkedIn.
Her coaching program brings in good money, and every dollar of it stops the week she stops taking calls.
She took a week off in July, and the income for that week was zero.
Her struggle:
She only gets paid while she’s on a call, so a week off costs her a week of income.
Waiting for her next call, she stumbles on the true story of a designer
who also got paid only for the hours he worked,
and whose company now brings in more than $30 million a year.
It started with answers he’d already given away for free.
💻 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.
None of it was new.
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 books like it, 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 $30 million a year.
He did not find more hours.
He changed what he was selling.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Own What Keeps Paying
Nathan wrote down the advice he’d already given away one client at a time,
and it kept paying him long after he wrote it.
This hack is called Own What Keeps Paying.
He didn’t work more hours to get there.
He stopped being paid by the hour, and sold what he’d already written down instead.
So you stop selling hours and start selling work you made once.
The questions people keep asking you, and the answers you give them, are the product.
It keeps paying on the weeks you don’t wanna work at all.
Answers are now free from AI, so what you sell has to be your tested system or your judgment.
🛠️ Ruby’s turn
Remember Ruby, whose coaching income stops the week she stops taking calls?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it the questions people ask her on every call.
The reply from her AI sidekick is short:
Write down the answers you give on every call, and sell them as a guide that keeps working while you’re off.
That weekend, she writes down the five questions everyone she coaches asks, and her answer to each one.
On Sunday night, the guide goes up on her LinkedIn profile, with a price on it.
🌅 Five months later
Ruby took a whole week off in December, and didn’t take a single call.
This time, she didn’t spend the week worrying about it.
People read her guide before they book a call now, so every call starts on the hard questions.
The answers you keep giving away one call at a time are already a product.
Write down the answers you keep giving, once, and sell them.
That’s it, my fellow renegades!
Yours ‘helping you borrow the shortcuts from people who already made it’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds the thing you already repeat and turns it into a product that keeps selling without you.
You just tell it what you keep explaining.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you explain over and over, and what you’ve already written down
- However rough. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. how to write a LinkedIn post that doesn’t sound like a press release, and a checklist in my Notes app plus four long emailsHow you get paid now, and what happens when you stop
- e.g. one-on-one coaching calls, about $90 an hour, and it stops the week I stopWhat you’d like to be earning from in two years
- e.g. something that does not need me on a call
🚀 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 client notes, my calendar, or my session notes, 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 posts on LinkedIn.
- 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 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, and what I have already written down somewhere, however rough:
{e.g. how to write a LinkedIn post that doesn't sound like a press release, and a checklist in my Notes app plus four long emails}
How I currently get paid, and what happens when I stop:
{e.g. one-on-one coaching calls, about $90 an hour, and it stops the week I stop}
What I would want to still be earning from in two years:
{e.g. something that does not need me on a call}
======================== 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.