Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Sam’s community that nobody has paid for yet
Sam is an operations manager who writes a newsletter on simple systems for small-business owners.
He is building a paid community for his readers.
He has spent two months of evenings on it: the platform, the welcome video, the first six weeks of content.
🧩 His struggle:
He builds the whole thing first and asks for money last, so he’ll only find out if anyone pays after the months are gone.
On his commute, he reads a newsletter a friend forwarded,
with the true story of a man
who had a business idea and nothing built yet,
and whose company made $80 million in 2023.
His first website cost him about fifty dollars.
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💵 The website that was one PayPal button
Noah Kagan sent a cold email to a college student in Ohio he had never met.
Noah had been employee number thirty at Facebook, and got fired.
Then he ran marketing at Mint.com, the personal finance app, and by 2010 he was working for himself.
He wanted to start a deals site, a website that sells software cheap for a few days and keeps part of each sale.
He had not built one.
The student was Alan Schaaf, who had made Imgur, a site where you upload a picture and get a link to it.
Reddit is a huge discussion site, and when someone there posted a picture, it was almost always an Imgur link.
That sent millions of people through Imgur every day.
Imgur sold an upgrade called Imgur Pro, a paid version of the site with extra features.
Noah’s idea was to offer Imgur Pro to those Reddit users at a discount, and keep part of every sale.
“We are launching a deal site and wanted to promote your Imgur Pro,” he wrote to Alan, Imgur’s founder.
“Think we can sell 200+ of it for you at no cost or work for you.”
There was no deal site.
There was only the email.
Alan said yes.
Now Noah was allowed to sell Imgur Pro, but not one person had bought anything yet.
Then Noah emailed Chris Slowe, one of the engineers who built Reddit, and took him to breakfast.
Over bacon he asked Chris for free ads on Reddit.
He didn’t ask for advice, and he didn’t ask for a discount.
He asked for free ads.
“Why not?” Chris said.
“Our users love Imgur. They’ll be thrilled to get a discount.”
Only then did Noah build anything.
A PayPal button is a link that takes somebody’s card payment, and you can drop one onto a page without writing any code.
He paid a developer twelve dollars an hour to put one on a web page.
Four hours of that developer’s time came to about fifty dollars.
He called the deal site AppSumo, and AppSumo.com went from nothing to live in 48 hours.
The ads went up, and the first sale landed within minutes.
He sold the two hundred Imgur Pro accounts he had set as his target, off a website that cost him fifty dollars.
“Focus on Zero to $1,” is how Noah puts it.
“Get that first dollar.”
By 2020 AppSumo was making over $65 million a year.
In 2023 it made $80 million.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Pay-First Test
Noah took two hundred payments before he had built anything more than a fifty-dollar web page.
That test grew into AppSumo, which made $80 million in 2023.
This move is called The Pay-First Test.
Take real money before you spend the months, and spend as close to nothing as you can finding out.
Noah could have asked around whether a deal site sounded like a good business.
He didn’t do that.
He asked for money instead, because a person who pays is telling you the truth,
and a person who praises you is being kind.
So the next time you’re about to spend two months building something before you charge for it,
sell it this week instead.
A payment is the signal to start building.
A compliment isn’t.
Your AI sidekick can build the one-page sales page in an hour, so there’s no reason to build first.
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🛠️ Sam’s turn
Let’s check in on Sam, who has spent two months building a paid community without asking anyone to pay.
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it which readers said they’d join.
His AI sidekick says:
Ask five of your readers to pay for your community this week, before you build another lesson.
Before bed, he writes to the five readers who told him they’d join.
He asks each of them to pay for the first month, and tells them the community opens in two weeks.
He stops working on week three of the content.
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🌅 Two months later
Sam’s community has held a live call every Thursday for six weeks.
He builds each week’s lesson from the questions people ask on the call.
Nobody has asked for the six weeks of content he planned on his own.
A compliment on your idea is kind, but it doesn’t tell you anyone will pay.
Take real money for the thing you want to build, before you build it.
That’s it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours ‘proving to you that most business failures are preventable and success can be engineered’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below turns the thing you were going to build into something you can sell this week, before you build it.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you were going to build, and how long before you could charge for it
- e.g. a paid community for small-business owners, about two months of eveningsWho has told you it’s a good idea, and who you could ask for money by Friday
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. four readers and my old manager, all enthusiastic, and I could ask the readers who reply to every issueWhat you’d deliver if three people paid tomorrow
- e.g. a live two-hour call on Zoom next month, walking through the systems from my newsletter
🚀 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 newsletter, my community posts, my member list, or my 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 small-business owners who want simple systems for running their business.
- 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.
- Surveys, waitlists, likes and "would you buy this" questions do not count as validation. Only money changing hands counts. Every step must be doable before anything is built.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I was going to build, and how long before I could charge for it:
{e.g. a paid community for small-business owners, about two months of evenings}
Who has told me it is a good idea, and who I could ask for money by Friday:
{e.g. four readers and my old manager, all enthusiastic, and I could ask the readers who reply to every issue}
What I would deliver if three people paid tomorrow:
{e.g. a live two-hour call on Zoom next month, walking through the systems from my newsletter}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The pay-first offer — what exactly I am selling before it exists, described as the buyer would read it.
2. The price and the number — what to charge, and how many payments mean go, decided now.
3. The ask — the message to send, written to one person, that requests money rather than opinions.
4. The five to ask — who to send it to first, and in what order.
5. If nobody pays — what that tells me, and the specific next thing to try instead of building anyway.
Then tell me which of my supporters would say yes to a survey and no to an invoice.