Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Maya’s membership that only nine people joined
Maya is a project manager at a hospital who writes a newsletter for new team leads.
She spends three months building a paid membership for her ten thousand subscribers.
She launches it, and nine people join.
🧩 Her struggle:
She builds the biggest version first, so it takes too long before it pays enough to keep her going.
At lunch, she clicks on a video with the true story of a consultant
who also dreamed of a product that customers pay for every month,
and later built one and sold it.
He started by selling a little program for sending bills.
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🪜 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.
TinySeed now manages more than $59 million.
But Rob did not start there.
In 2005 he was a consultant, paid by the hour.
He wanted to stop trading his hours for money, and build a product that kept selling even when he was not working.
He did not start by building his dream product, the one customers would pay for every month.
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.
He had 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 brought him ten or fifteen dollars in total.
Finding each buyer with 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, that customers find in one place, like Google.
Step two: add more like it, until they pay your bills and you no longer need your job.
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.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Stair Step Method
Rob sold small products that people bought once, until they replaced his consulting income.
Only then did he build Drip, and later he sold it.
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.
He didn’t start small because he lacked ambition.
He sold the simplest thing he 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 newsletter, 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.
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🛠️ Maya’s turn
Remember Maya, and the paid membership that only nine of her ten thousand readers joined?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what her readers keep emailing her about.
The reply from her AI sidekick is short:
Put your membership on hold, and sell your readers a $20 guide to running their first team meeting.
She writes the guide over two weekends.
On Monday, she tells her readers about it in one short email.
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🌅 Six months later
Maya has written three small guides now.
Each one answers a question her readers kept emailing her about.
She knows which questions they care about most, and the membership can wait until she’s ready.
Your big idea doesn’t have to be the first thing you sell.
Sell one small thing that people buy once, and build the subscription after those sales pay your bills.
That’s it, my fellow trailblazers!
Yours ‘helping you build an AI sidekick that works and makes money while you enjoy life’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds your step one, so you are not building step three from a standing start.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you want to build eventually, and how long it would realistically take you
- e.g. a paid membership for the people who read my newsletter, six months of evenings before it could take a single paymentWhat people ask you about, and a small thing you could sell once, for a fixed price, within a month
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. how to run a first team meeting, and I could sell a one-page meeting plan with a walkthroughWhat you earn from this now, and what your job pays
- e.g. nothing yet, and the job pays $4,200 a month
🚀 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 past issues, my subscriber numbers, or my drafts, 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 new team leads in their first year.
- 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.
- 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 paid membership for the people who read my newsletter, 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 run a first team meeting, and I could sell a one-page meeting plan 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.