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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 chaos.
To her, a good breakfast is five minutes and a blender, not a project.
Her readers want the same — 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, and settles for something flat.
Meanwhile her AI sits open in the next tab, unused for this.
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
James Altucher 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 generating ideas, but knowing which are yours.
His muscle, updated: let AI be the machine, and you be the curator.
Altucher wrote ten ideas a day — but nine were junk.
The ten-a-day habit was never the point.
The point was his taste: knowing the one idea worth chasing.
🚗 The steps
🧬 Step 1 — Feed AI the raw material only you have.
Give it your lived experience, your POV, your readers' real questions.
Generic input makes generic ideas — so make it personal.
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.
Ask for fifty ideas, not five. Let the machine do the grinding.
This is the part Altucher made you sweat for — gone in seconds.
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.
This is your job, and AI can't do it.
Pick the few that sound like you and no one else.
Asha reads the fifty and trusts her gut.
She keeps three that feel unmistakably hers.
The taste is the moat — the machine just filled the well.
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 🦸♂️