Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Asha writes a weekly newsletter about smoothies and fast healthy breakfasts.
She started it for people who skip breakfast because mornings are pure chaos.
To her, a good breakfast is five minutes and a blender — not a project.
Her readers want the same thing.
Something quick that isn't a sad granola bar.
⛳️ Problem:
Asha forces ideas out by hand every week, like it's still 2015.
She brainstorms, crosses out the bad ones, settles for something flat.
Meanwhile her AI sits open in the next tab, unused for this. Wild, right?
A year in, idea day is still the slowest, most dreaded part of her week.
Her problem: how to never run dry on ideas worth writing.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Be the curator, not the machine
Think of a great restaurant critic.
They don't cook the hundred dishes themselves.
They taste them, and tell you the one worth ordering.
That's the move here.
The kitchen makes the volume.
Your taste picks the winner.
James Altucher built and sold several companies and wrote the bestseller Choose Yourself.
He made the "idea machine" famous — write ten ideas a day.
That was the right move before AI.
Now AI can spin up a hundred ideas in seconds.
So the grind Altucher prescribed is over.
The scarce skill flips — not making ideas, but knowing which are yours.
And get this — the ten-a-day habit was never really the point.
Altucher wrote ten a day, but nine were junk.
The point was his taste: knowing the one idea worth chasing.
His muscle, updated: let AI generate the options, and you pick the good ones.
🚗 The steps
🧬 Step 1 — Feed AI the raw material only you have.
A stock cube makes thin, flat soup.
Your grandmother's broth — real bones, hours on the stove — tastes like no one else's.
Same with ideas: generic input in, generic ideas out.
So give AI the stuff only you have.
Your lived experience, your POV, your readers' real questions.
Asha hands AI her own story.
Eight years of chaotic mornings, her blender hacks, her readers' 2am DMs.
Now the ideas it makes are hers, not anyone's.
⚡ Step 2 — Let AI generate the volume.
Picture a slot machine you can pull fifty times in a minute.
Most pulls are nothing.
A few light up.
You'd never pull that lever by hand all day.
So let the machine do the grinding.
Ask for fifty ideas, not five.
Asha asks for fifty breakfast-content ideas.
They land in under a minute.
Most are mediocre.
A handful spark.
👃 Step 3 — Curate with your taste.
A wine taster sniffs ten glasses and knows.
Can't explain it on paper — but the gut call is dead right.
That nose is the whole skill, and it took years.
This is your job, and AI can't do it.
Pick the few ideas that sound like you and no one else.
Asha reads the fifty and trusts her gut.
She keeps three that feel unmistakably hers.
Her taste is what no one can copy — AI just lays out the options.
The prompt below floods you with ideas from your own experience, then helps you curate.
You just feed it your story and your readers' questions.
🧸 AI makes the volume; your taste makes it yours.
🏄♀️ 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 as is, your AI sidekick will use the example values and will give 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:
My lived experience and POV (the raw material only I have — my story, my hard-won opinions, the weird specifics of how I do this):
{e.g. eight years of chaotic mornings, my exact blender shortcuts, my belief that breakfast should take five minutes, not be a project}
My readers' real questions (paste the actual DMs, replies, and comments — the more specific, the better):
{e.g. "what do I make when I have no fruit?" / "how do I stop my smoothie separating?" / "is frozen as good as fresh?"}
My topic (what my newsletter or channel is about):
{e.g. smoothies and fast healthy breakfasts for people who hate mornings}
For Outcome: {e.g. fifty idea options generated from MY material, with the few that are most "me" flagged}
Outputs:
1. Fifty ideas — generated FROM my lived experience and my readers' questions above, so they're ideas only I could have. Numbered.
2. The taste shortlist — the 5 ideas that most sound like ME and no one else, with one line each on why they fit my POV.
3. The generic cut — the ideas that are bland or could've come from any account, flagged so I don't waste time on them.
4. The one to write first — the single strongest idea, turned into a working title and a one-line promise.
Then tell me what raw material about ME I should feed you more of, so the next batch is even harder for anyone else to copy.
One pile of raw material only you have.
One flood of ideas from the machine.
One handful of gems only your taste could spot.
That's it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours 'proving one person (without a team) + an AI sidekick can build something big' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️