Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
⠀
Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
⠀
🙋♂️ Wes’s workshop price
Wes is a data analyst who writes a newsletter on the side, explaining money numbers in plain words.
His first workshop teaches what a thousand other workshops already teach, and most of them charge less than he wants to.
So he drops his price to match the cheapest of them, and then drops it again.
🧩 His struggle:
He builds his workshop out of advice anyone could give, so he ends up charging whatever the cheapest teacher charges.
At his sister’s house, he picks up a book by one of the best-known investors in Silicon Valley.
It tells the true story of a whole industry that also has to match everyone else’s prices,
and keeps almost nothing of the billions it brings in.
Guess how much an airline keeps from your ticket.
⠀
✈️ The industry that serves millions and keeps nothing
Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal and sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion.
Later, he co-founded Palantir, a company that analyzes data.
In his book, Zero to One, he asks a question that sounds like a riddle.
Which is worth more: a business that creates hundreds of billions of dollars of value, or a business that creates far less?
He answers the riddle with two real examples.
In 2012 the U.S. airline industry flew millions of people and brought in about $160 billion.
On an average one-way ticket of $178, the airlines kept thirty-seven cents in profit per passenger trip.
That same year, Google brought in $50 billion, about a third as much.
Google kept 21% of it as profit.
So Google kept about one dollar in every five.
The airlines kept thirty-seven cents on a $178 ticket, which is about one dollar in every five hundred.
Turns out Peter’s line about it is one sentence: “Creating value is not enough — you also need to capture some of the value you create.”
In plain terms: helping a lot of people doesn’t automatically mean you get paid for it.
Being useful and getting paid for being useful are two different things, and you have to actually go do the second one.
Peter’s reason: the airlines have competitors.
In search, Google had almost none.
⠀
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Monopoly of One
The airlines fly millions of people and keep thirty-seven cents each,
while Google, with no real competitor in search, keeps about one dollar in every five.
This strategy is called The Monopoly of One.
Peter’s point: creating value and keeping it are two separate jobs, and most people only ever do the first.
Nobody else has worked your specific jobs or made your specific mistakes.
Nobody else has spent years answering the exact questions your readers keep asking you.
Build your offer out of that combination, not out of general advice anyone could write.
A competitor can copy the advice, but they can’t copy the years of experience that made you the one who could give it.
So you stop asking how many people you helped this month.
Ask instead: which of those readers paid me, for something nobody else could have sold them?
That’s your monopoly of one.
AI can write the general advice for anyone.
It can’t write your years of experience.
⠀
🛠️ Wes’s turn
So what about Wes and the workshop price he keeps cutting to match the cheapest one?
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it about his four years in a bank’s loan department.
His AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Your four years in a bank’s loan department are the part no other workshop can teach,
so build the workshop around how a bank reads someone’s numbers, and stop matching the cheapest price.
He rewrites the workshop page that night, around how a bank decides whether to lend someone money.
Then he raises the price back to the number he first wanted.
⠀
🌅 Two months later
Wes hasn’t changed the workshop price since that night.
When a reader asks what makes it different, he answers in one sentence.
Forty readers replied to the issue that announced the workshop, asking about their own loans.
Somewhere in your own work history is something only you can teach.
Build your offer from what only you have, then set your own price.
That’s it, my fellow renegades!
Yours ‘helping you gain years of experience without putting in the years’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds the part of your work that is genuinely only yours, and what to charge for it.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you offer now, and who else offers roughly the same thing
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. a workshop on reading money numbers for my newsletter readers, and so does every personal-finance blogger with a websiteWhat you charge, and how you decided
- e.g. $150 a seat, picked because that is what two other people chargeThe mix in your background that nobody else has
- The jobs you’ve done, in order, and what only you could teach because of them.
- e.g. four years in a bank’s loan department, then twelve as a data analyst, so I can teach how a bank reads your numbers
🚀 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 workshop outline, my slides, 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 people who want money numbers explained in plain words.
- 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.
- Judge every item by one test: could a competent stranger offer this next week? If yes, it is not the answer, no matter how good I am at it.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I currently offer, and who else offers roughly the same thing:
{e.g. a workshop on reading money numbers for my newsletter readers, and so does every personal-finance blogger with a website}
What I charge, and how I decided:
{e.g. $150 a seat, picked because that is what two other people charge}
The combination in my background nobody else has, and what only I could say:
{e.g. four years in a bank's loan department, then twelve as a data analyst, so I can teach how a bank reads your numbers}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The commodity part — everything I do that a competent stranger could offer next week, listed plainly.
2. The uncopyable part — what genuinely could not come from anybody else, and why not.
3. The offer built on it — one thing to sell that only works because it is me, described as a buyer would see it.
4. The price — a number, with the reasoning, set by what only I have rather than by what others charge.
5. What to stop selling — the commodity work to drop or hand off, and what that frees up.
Then tell me the one sentence that says what only I do, in words a stranger would repeat.