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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Nell has a full-time job as a product manager at a software company.
She decides what her team should build next, and keeps everyone agreed on it.
For months she's wanted to start a business of her own on the side.
She has no idea what it should be.
Her friends text her before they buy anything. She has never once wondered why.
⛳️ Problem:
Nell keeps coming up with different business ideas she could build.
Every one of them is something she would have to go and learn about first.
So she starts learning. It gets boring, she drops it, and moves on to the next idea.
Many months pass and still no business. So sad.
Her struggle:
She keeps hunting for a business idea, and never once asks why her friends text her before every purchase.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ What Doesn't Feel Like Work
Some people can sit with a jigsaw puzzle for two hours and enjoy every minute.
Other people look at the same puzzle and find it slow and boring.
Same puzzle. Completely different feeling.
Paul Graham noticed that this difference tells you something important.
He built a company called Viaweb, which made software that let people open a shop on the internet.
That was hard to do back then, so it sold to Yahoo for about $49 million.
After that he started Y Combinator.
It gives money and advice to brand-new companies, and has backed over 4,000 of them.
Here is his rule, in his own words.
"If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for."
In plain words: find the thing that tires everyone else out, but doesn't tire you.
So there is one question to ask yourself.
What feels like work to other people, and doesn't feel like work to me?
Graham adds one more thing. The stranger your answer sounds to other people, the better it is.
Get this — this is the one thing you can't see about yourself.
It never feels special to you. It just feels normal.
So you assume everyone finds it as easy as you do.
And you go hunting for a skill you'd have to learn from scratch.
🚗 So Nell tried it her way.
Back to Nell, who keeps starting to learn a new business idea and quitting a few weeks later.
She sat down and asked herself Graham's question.
Her answer felt almost silly. She loves the boring part of buying things.
Last month she spent a whole evening choosing a $40 kettle.
She read the reviews, put the best ten in an Excel sheet, and compared them line by line.
She used AI too, to summarize what hundreds of reviews were saying.
She checked which ones people still liked a year later. Then she picked one and bought it.
She enjoyed that evening.
Her friends think this is madness. They just want someone to tell them which one to get.
That is exactly why they text her first.
Nell had always assumed everyone shopped this way, so it never looked special to her.
So that became the thing she built.
One everyday thing each week — a kettle, a backpack, a desk lamp — and one clear pick.
She wrote it for people like her friends. They hate the searching, and they just want to be told which one to buy.
Not her research. Just the answer. Buy this one.
And this is a real business.
When a reader buys the thing she picked, the shop pays her a small cut, and the reader pays the same price either way.
A site called Wirecutter was built on exactly this.
The New York Times bought it in 2016 for $30 million.
Nell wrote her first pick that weekend and sent it to the thirty people she knew.
Six wrote back the same day.
Two of them said they had been putting off buying a kettle for a month, and one asked her to do office chairs next.
Nailed it — the evening her friends would never sit through was the whole business.
🧸 The work you enjoy, that tires everyone else out, is the business you build.
The prompt below finds the thing you do easily that tires everyone else out.
You just tell it how you really spend your time.
🏄♀️ 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 it as is. Your AI sidekick will use the example values and give you an 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.
- If you can see my notes, messages or calendar directly, pull what I actually spend spare time on from there. Otherwise, use what I paste below.
Inputs:
Things I do without being asked, that I'd happily do on a free evening:
{e.g. spending a whole evening comparing ten kettles in a table before buying one}
What other people say when I tell them I do those things:
{e.g. "just buy one already", "how do you have the patience for that"}
What people already come to me for, without me offering:
{e.g. friends text me before they buy anything}
The ideas on my list that don't feel like mine:
{e.g. a productivity course, a design podcast, a newsletter about my day job}
For Audience: {e.g. people who hate researching and just want to be told which one to buy}
For Outcome: {e.g. the one thing I do easily that tires other people out, and a business built on it}
Outputs:
1. My list — everything I do easily that the people around me clearly find tiring.
2. The strongest one — which item on that list is unusual to others AND saves them money or hours, and why.
3. Why I missed it — the reason I've been treating it as normal instead of special.
4. The thing to sell — not the work I enjoy doing, but the finished answer other people get from it.
5. How it makes money — who pays, for what, and one real business already doing it this way.
6. My first four issues — the first four things I could publish, all built on that one thing.
Then name the ONE thing people already ask me for, that I have never charged for.
That's it, my fellow anti-status-quo-ers!
Yours 'helping you skip years of pain and frustration in your life and business' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️