Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🍦 The five-dollar course that came before the tubs
On May 5, 1978, a line of people stood outside an old gas station in Burlington, Vermont.
Inside, two friends in their twenties were about to scoop their first ice cream cones.
Their names were Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield.
They had been friends since seventh-grade gym class.
Neither of them had ever run a business.
A year earlier, neither of them knew how to make ice cream.
Their first idea was a bagel shop.
Then they found out the machines for making bagels cost more money than they had, so they dropped it.
So they signed up for a class on how to make ice cream.
Penn State University ran it by mail, and it cost five dollars.
Five dollars, and they were ice cream makers.
They put in $4,000 each and borrowed $4,000 more from a bank.
Twelve thousand dollars in all.
They rented a gas station nobody else wanted.
One shop, one town.
Now look at what they did not build.
No factory.
No trucks.
No tubs in supermarkets.
They could not have started with a factory and supermarket tubs.
They did not have the money, and that was not even the biggest problem.
They did not know yet which flavors people would like, or what a cone should cost.
The only way to find out was to sell cones across the counter, one at a time, every day, and watch what people ordered.
Less than two years later, they started selling tubs in grocery stores.
In 2000, the company was sold to Unilever for a reported $326 million.
Holy moly, from a five-dollar course.
Ben and Jerry did not start with a factory and trucks.
They started with one shop and one scoop at a time.
The money from those cones, and what they learned selling them, paid for the growth later.
⛳️ The problem
Ben and Jerry sold ice cream cones from one shop for two years before they ever sold a single tub in a grocery store.
These days, our YouTube channel has ten thousand subscribers, and we want to turn it into a business.
So we spend three months building a paid membership, with monthly fees, a private community, and weekly live calls.
We launch it to the channel, and nine people join.
Nine people paying ten dollars a month does not cover our time, so after four months we quit, still working the day job.
A small one-time product, like a twenty-dollar guide, never crossed our mind, because it did not feel like a real business.
Ben and Jerry sold twenty-cent cones for two years, and those cones paid for everything that came after.
There is an order to climb in, and it starts much smaller than a membership.
Stay with me, because a consultant is about to buy a tiny piece of software and sell it copy by copy.
He ends up running a $59 million fund.
🪜 The consultant who bought an invoicing program
Rob Walling was a software founder who had started six companies.
He also co-founded TinySeed, a fund that backs small software businesses and now manages more than $55 million.
Rob did not start there either.
In 2005 he was a consultant, paid by the hour.
He wanted to stop trading his hours for money, and build something that sold while he slept.
He did not build his dream product.
Instead, he bought a small program called DotNetInvoice, which freelancers use to send their customers a bill.
Each customer paid once and downloaded a copy.
He did not run ads or chase customers.
People searched Google for an invoicing program, found his website, and bought it.
That was his whole business.
One product, and one way for customers to find it: Google.
By 2008 that income was growing, so he started a few more small businesses just like it.
A job listings site for people who fix power lines.
An online store that sold beach towels.
A couple of short books he sold as downloads.
None of them were glamorous.
Every one was a one-time sale.
Get this — he wasted more than a year trying to grow the beach towel store with paid ads.
Each towel buyer was worth ten or fifteen dollars, and the ads cost more than that.
But the other small products kept selling.
Together, they brought in enough money each month that he no longer needed the consulting income.
So he quit consulting.
Only then, with his time free and money coming in, did he start building his dream product.
It was called Drip, an email marketing tool.
Customers paid a subscription for it, a fee every month, for as long as they kept using it.
He sold Drip to a company called Leadpages in 2016.
Rob says Drip would not have worked as his first project.
He would not have had the time, the money, the skills, or the confidence.
He calls this strategy the Stair Step Method.
Step one: a small product, sold once, found through one channel.
Step two: add more like it, until the income buys back your time.
Step three, and only step three: the subscription product, where customers pay you every month.
Rob says a subscription business is what every solo founder dreams of, because the money keeps coming in every month.
But he says do not start there.
A subscription starts tiny, a few dollars a month per customer, and takes a couple of years to grow into a real income.
You need something paying the bills while you wait.
So there was nothing wrong with Rob wanting to build Drip.
He was right to wait, though, until the small products were earning enough that he could work on it full time.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Stair Step Method
Ben and Jerry sold cones from one shop for two years before they sold their first tub in a grocery store.
Rob sold a small invoicing program, one download at a time, for years before he built Drip.
Rob's strategy is called The Stair Step Method.
Step one: sell one small product that people buy once.
Step two: add a few more small products like it, until they pay your bills.
Step three: only now, build the subscription that customers pay for every month.
Neither Ben and Jerry nor Rob started small because they lacked ambition.
They both sold the simplest thing they could sell right away.
The money from that small thing is what paid for the big thing later.
So the night you sit down to plan a paid membership for your channel, stop.
Ask yourself instead: what small thing could I sell next month for $20?
A template.
A short guide.
A checklist that solves one problem your readers keep emailing you about.
Sell that first.
Then sell a few more like it.
When those small sales are paying your bills, you are ready to build the membership.
And by then, you will know exactly what your readers are willing to pay for.
Sell the cones before you build the factory.
That's it, my fellow trailblazers!
Yours 'helping you build an AI sidekick that works and makes money while you enjoy life' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds your step one, so you are not building step three from a standing start.
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 video list, my analytics, or my drafts, 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 freelance translators three or more years in.
- 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.
- Step one must be a ONE-TIME purchase through a single channel, buildable in weeks. No subscriptions, no memberships, no platforms, however tempting.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I want to build eventually, and how long that would realistically take me:
{e.g. a subscription community for the people who watch my channel, six months of evenings before it could take a single payment}
What I already know that people ask me about, and what I could sell once, for a fixed price, within a month:
{e.g. how to price a rush job and how to fire a bad client, and I could sell a rate-setting spreadsheet with a walkthrough}
What I earn from this now, and what my job pays:
{e.g. nothing yet, and the job pays $4,200 a month}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. Step one — the one-time product to build in the next month, described as a buyer would see it.
2. The single channel — where it gets sold, and why that one place rather than everywhere.
3. Step two — what repeating looks like, and the monthly number that means I have replaced the job.
4. When step three unlocks — the specific condition that says I am ready for the recurring thing.
5. What to shelve — the parts of the big idea that go in a drawer until then, so I stop tinkering.
Then tell me what I could sell within thirty days, and what it should cost.