Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 5-7 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Ruby’s email list that never hears about her course
Ruby is a content strategist who built a course on writing for LinkedIn on the side.
People find her free guide, download it, and join her email list every single day.
She only mentions the course twice a year, when she runs a big launch.
🧩 Her struggle:
She only sells during a launch, so new subscribers wait months to hear about the course.
Over coffee, a friend tells her the true story of a language teacher
who also had an email list and courses to sell,
and now sells them every day, even on days he doesn’t work.
He started with a free blog.
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📚 The teacher who wrote his sales emails once
Olly Richards runs a business that has sold more than ten million dollars of language courses.
He works on it about four days a month.
Here is how he got there.
At nineteen, after a breakup, Olly bought a one-way ticket to Paris.
There he worked night shifts at a youth hostel.
He had to speak French to the guests all night, every night, so he learned it quickly.
Over the years he taught himself eight languages, always by using them with real people, not by studying grammar books.
By 2013 he was a manager at an English school in Qatar.
It was a steady job, but he could see himself doing the same thing for the next twenty years, and he did not want that.
Then he read a book called The $100 Startup.
One chapter was about a man who earned a living from a blog about learning languages.
Olly remembers thinking: “well, I can do that.”
He started a free blog that same day.
For two years, every evening and weekend, he wrote one long post a week, while keeping his day job.
By the end of those two years, thirty to forty thousand people were reading his blog every month.
In 2015 his daughter was born.
He quit his job, moved back to England, and turned the blog into a business.
He called it StoryLearning.
Instead of teaching a language from a grammar book, his courses teach it through a story.
Now here is the part you can copy.
Olly says the business works in three steps.
Step one: free articles bring people to the website.
Step two: some of those people join his email list, which means they give him their email address so he can write to them.
Step three: the emails do the selling.
About two thirds of all the money StoryLearning has ever made came through email.
And most of that selling is done by something called a welcome sequence.
A welcome sequence is a set of emails, written once, that goes out automatically to every new person who joins the list.
Nobody presses send.
The software sends them, one a day, on a schedule.
Olly’s welcome sequence is seven emails, one a day for a week.
If you join this morning, you get email one today, and email seven a week from now.
If you join in December, you get the same seven emails, on your own seven days.
Olly does not have to sell to anyone himself.
In his words, “many superfans will buy within 7-10 days of their own accord.”
This is why Olly only needs to work four days a month.
Those seven emails do the selling for him, to every new subscriber, every day, on their own.
Olly wrote his sales emails one time, years ago.
They are still selling for him today, to people who joined this morning.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Welcome Sequence
Olly’s seven emails offer his course to every new subscriber during their first week.
The emails do the selling, which is why he can run the whole business in four days a month.
This tactic has an everyday name, the welcome sequence, and Olly teaches his own version of one.
Most of us only sell during a launch, which is the one week you tell everyone on your list about the course at once.
Olly didn’t write a new sales pitch every time a new person showed up.
Olly wrote seven emails, and the software sends those same seven to every new subscriber in their first week.
He wrote his sales emails once, and the software sends them on its own.
So the week a new person joins your email list, your welcome emails tell them what your course is and why it will help them,
whether you are at your desk or on vacation.
You never have to run another launch to make a sale.
The emails you wrote once keep selling, month after month, to every new person who joins.
Your AI sidekick can draft all seven emails tonight.
You make them sound like you.
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🛠️ Ruby’s turn
Now, back to Ruby, who only tells her email list about her course twice a year.
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what her course teaches.
Her AI sidekick doesn’t waste words:
Write seven welcome emails once, and let them offer your course to every new subscriber in their first week.
She writes all seven over two weekends.
On Sunday night, she switches them on and goes to bed.
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🌅 Two months later
Every new subscriber on Ruby’s list now gets seven emails in their first week.
Dozens of them have replied to tell her about their own LinkedIn posts.
She hasn’t run a launch since.
Your newest subscribers are probably still waiting to hear what you sell.
Write your sales emails once, and let them greet every new subscriber in their first week.
That’s it, my fellow outliers!
Yours ‘showing you that building a business is fun, not a drain’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below writes the sequence that greets every new subscriber and does the selling for you.
🧰 What you’ll need
What new subscribers get from you now, and what you sell and what it costs
- e.g. a thank-you email for downloading my free guide and then nothing, and a $200 course on writing for LinkedInWhy people joined your list, and why you built what you sell
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool, the way you’d tell a friend.
- e.g. they found my post on first lines and wanted the rest, and I posted to almost nobody for a year before I learned itThe three things a new reader needs to understand before buying makes sense
- e.g. that the first line matters most, that writing for one reader beats writing for everyone, and that most people post about the wrong things
🚀 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 course outline, my lesson drafts, or my sales page, 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 people 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.
- Every email must be worth reading even by somebody who never buys. No countdown timers, no fake scarcity, no "last chance" on an evergreen sequence.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What people get when they subscribe now, and what I sell and what it costs:
{e.g. a thank-you email for downloading my free guide and then nothing, and a $200 course on writing for LinkedIn}
Why somebody joined my list in the first place, and the story I would tell a friend about why I built this:
{e.g. they found my post on first lines and wanted the rest, and I posted to almost nobody for a year before I learned it}
The three things a new reader most needs to understand before buying makes sense:
{e.g. that the first line matters most, that writing for one reader beats writing for everyone, and that most people post about the wrong things}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The sequence — seven emails, each with its job named, in order, and why that order.
2. The drafts — each one written out, useful on its own, in my voice.
3. Where the ask goes — which emails mention the product, how, and which deliberately do not.
4. What happens after seven — what a subscriber gets on day 30 so the list does not go quiet.
5. What to measure — the two numbers that tell me which email to rewrite first.
Then tell me which of the seven is doing the most work, and what happens if I delete the other six.