Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 5-7 minutes
Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
✉️ The letter that nobody could beat for twenty-eight years
In 1975, The Wall Street Journal started mailing people a two-page letter.
It began like this:
"On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college."
The Journal kept mailing that same letter for the next twenty-eight years.
The letter was selling subscriptions.
You paid once a year, and the newspaper arrived at your door every morning.
Back then the Journal was the only business newspaper sold across all of America.
Its readers lived everywhere, so it could not send a salesperson to every door.
Instead, it did what most big magazines did: it sold by mail.
A letter arrived in your mailbox, asked you to subscribe, and had an order card tucked inside.
A man named Martin Conroy wrote that letter.
Martin was a copywriter.
That means he wrote the words in ads for a living, at an advertising agency in New York.
His letter told a story about two men.
They were alike in every way.
Same college.
Both good students.
Both went to work for the same company.
Both got married and had three children.
Twenty-five years later, one of them ran a small department.
The other was president of the company.
Then the letter asked: what made the difference?
And it answered in plain words: "The difference lies in what each person knows and how he or she makes use of that knowledge."
The Journal, the letter said, is where that knowledge comes from.
Now here is the part that matters.
The Journal did not just keep mailing Martin's letter and hope for the best.
Every so often, it paid another writer to write a brand-new letter.
Then it mailed the new one to half the people and Martin's to the other half, to see which one sold more.
Get this — over twenty-eight years, dozens of top copywriters and ad agencies tried to beat Martin's letter.
Not one of them ever did.
The Journal kept mailing his letter, with only small changes, until 2003.
When Martin died in 2006, The New York Times wrote that his one letter had sold about two billion dollars of subscriptions.
Martin wrote the letter once.
It did the selling, every single day, for twenty-eight years.
⛳️ The problem
Martin's letter asked every person to subscribe, the very day it arrived in their mailbox.
Meanwhile, people find our free guide, download it, and join our email list every single day.
Each of them gets one "thanks for downloading" email, and then silence.
We do have a course to sell them, but we only mention it twice a year, when we run a big launch.
So hundreds of people have been sitting on our list for months, and not one of them has ever been offered the course.
Martin's letter did not wait for a launch.
It made the offer the day each person's name reached the list, and it kept doing that for twenty-eight years.
There is a set of seven emails that makes the offer to every new subscriber in their first week, without you lifting a finger.
A language teacher wrote seven emails once, and they have sold more than $10 million of courses for him.
Here is what he wrote.
📚 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 and 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 the part worth copying.
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.
He does not have to sell anything himself.
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.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Welcome Sequence
Martin's letter asked every new person to subscribe on the day it landed,
and it kept doing that for twenty-eight years.
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 open the doors and ask everyone on the list at once.
Neither Martin nor Olly wrote a new sales pitch every time a new person showed up.
Martin wrote one letter, and the Journal mailed that same letter to every new address for twenty-eight years.
Olly wrote seven emails, and the software sends those same seven to every new subscriber on their first week.
They both wrote the selling once, and let it run 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.
Write the selling once, and let it run.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'showing you that building a business is fun, not a drain' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below writes the sequence that greets every new subscriber and does the selling for you.
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use your own files if it can see them, and the example values if it cannot.
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 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 assume engineers going for their PE license.
- Anything I leave as an example, treat as real. Anything I delete, fill in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption.
- 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 confirmation email and then nothing until the next issue, and a $200 course on preparing for the PE exam}
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 a post about the assessment interview and wanted the rest, and I failed the exam first time because nobody told me any of that}
The three things a new reader most needs to understand before buying makes sense:
{e.g. that the written submission matters less than they think, that the interview is the filter, and that most people prepare for the wrong one}
======================== 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.