Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 5-7 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Miles’s one big course
Miles is a customer success manager with a newsletter for new dads who work from home.
He is building a course with twelve modules, forty videos and a workbook,
and it is going to take the whole year.
🧩 His struggle:
He bets the whole year on one course no reader has seen, so being wrong costs him the year.
One night, he watches a video with the true story of a game maker from Finland
who also spent years hoping one game would become a big hit,
and whose company later sold for $776 million.
It started with a contest to make a game for a phone.
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🐦 The programmer who made 51 games before Angry Birds
Niklas Hed grew up about 45 minutes outside Helsinki, in Finland.
As a boy, he loved computer games where things moved like real objects.
When he was 12, he wrote a program that made a ball move across the screen.
Later he studied computer science at Helsinki University.
In 2003, he and two friends entered a contest run by Nokia and HP.
The goal was to make a phone game that several people could play together.
They won.
So Niklas started a small game company, and asked his older cousin Mikael to run it.
A year later, they renamed it Rovio, the Finnish word for bonfire.
Their plan depended on making one big hit game.
The hit never came.
Mikael left in 2005, after a disagreement over how to run the company.
Rovio could make good games, but it had no way to sell and advertise them on its own.
So big companies like EA and Namco paid Rovio to make games for them.
Some of those games sold millions of copies for the big companies.
But Rovio still had no hit of its own.
In 2007, Niklas started laying off staff.
By 2009, Rovio had shrunk from 50 people to 12.
The company was close to running out of money.
Niklas decided the company needed a new plan, and he asked Mikael to come back.
Mikael came back at the start of 2009.
By then, the iPhone had its App Store.
For the first time, a small company could sell a game to the whole world in one place.
The cousins wrote the new plan together.
Rovio would keep making games for other companies, to pay the bills.
In their spare time, Niklas’s team would make Rovio’s own games for the iPhone.
Niklas thought they would need ten to fifteen tries before one of them worked.
Their game designer, Jaakko Iisalo, turned his ideas into pictures of what the game would look like.
He showed Niklas and Mikael ten ideas at a time.
Over two months, he showed them hundreds.
One afternoon in March 2009, he showed a picture of round, angry-looking birds walking toward a pile of colorful blocks.
Niklas loved it.
Niklas’s team worked on the bird game whenever they had time left over.
While they worked on it, they also made four more games for other companies.
Angry Birds came out on the App Store in December 2009.
It was Rovio’s 52nd game.
That Christmas, Niklas’s mother, who never played games, was so busy playing it that she burned the turkey.
“I realized: this is it,” Niklas said.
But for three months, it barely sold in the US and the UK.
So Rovio focused on small countries first.
In Finland, a few hundred sales were enough to make Angry Birds the number one game.
Then it reached number one in Sweden, Denmark, Greece and the Czech Republic.
In February 2010, Apple put it on the front page of the UK App Store.
It jumped from about 600th place on that chart to first.
By April, it was number one in the US.
By the end of 2011, people had downloaded Angry Birds and its follow-up games more than 600 million times.
That year, Rovio made $106 million in sales.
It kept $67 million of that as profit, before tax.
In 2023, Sega, the company behind Sonic the Hedgehog, bought Rovio for $776 million.
Niklas couldn’t know ahead of time which game would be the hit.
So Rovio made game after game, and kept its own new games small and cheap, until one of them became a hit.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ A Portfolio of Small Bets
Niklas’s small company made 51 games before it had a hit of its own.
That hit was Angry Birds.
In 2023, Sega bought Rovio for $776 million.
Daniel Vassallo’s approach is called A Portfolio of Small Bets.
Daniel left his job at Amazon to sell small digital products, and started a community called Small Bets.
A small bet is a try that is quick to make and cheap to lose.
A portfolio means you run several of these small bets at the same time.
If one fails, you lose very little, because the others are still going.
Niklas didn’t know which try would be the big one.
His team kept making games, and waited to see which one players wanted.
So stop spending the whole year on one course.
Instead, make five small things in the next three months: a short guide, a template, a checklist, a mini course, a workshop.
Then watch which one your readers buy.
That one tells you what to build next.
If all five flop, you lost five small tries, not a year.
With AI, five small things can take five weeks, not three months.
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🛠️ Miles’s turn
So what about Miles, who is spending a whole year on one course that no reader has seen?
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it about the course he has been building for seven months.
His AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Stop building the one big course, and send your readers five small things over the next three months instead.
He picks the first one that night: a one-page checklist for working from home with a newborn.
On Friday, he sends it to his readers.
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🌅 Three months later
Of the five small things Miles sent, the checklist got the most replies by far.
Now he’s turning that one topic into a longer guide.
The dads in his community keep asking when it will be ready.
You might be spending a whole year on one idea that no reader has seen yet.
Keep trying small things, cheap enough that failing doesn’t hurt, until one of them works.
That’s it, my fellow renegades!
Yours ‘helping you gain years of experience without putting in the years’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below turns the one idea you have been carrying into several small ones you could run this quarter.
🧰 What you’ll need
The one idea you’ve been putting everything into
- How long it has taken so far, and how much longer it needs.
- e.g. a full course for new dads who work from home, seven months in, probably four moreThe other ideas you put aside for it, and what you know well enough to make in two weeks
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. a templates pack, a live call, a guide to setting up a home office, and I could ship how to work around a baby’s napsWhat you couldn’t afford to lose on one try
- e.g. more than about $250 and a couple of weekends per attempt
🚀 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 drafts, my sent issues, or my subscriber dashboard, 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 dads who work from home.
- 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.
- Every bet must be shippable in two weeks or less and must cost me almost nothing if it fails. Anything needing a quarter is not a small bet — break it up or cut it.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
The one idea I have been putting everything into, how long it has taken, and how much longer it needs:
{e.g. a full course for new dads who work from home, seven months in, probably four more}
Other ideas I parked because I am busy with it, and what I already know well enough to ship in two weeks:
{e.g. a templates pack, a live call, a guide to setting up a home office, and I could ship how to work around a baby's naps}
What I could not afford to lose:
{e.g. more than about $250 and a couple of weekends per attempt}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The big bet, honestly — what it has cost me so far and what it still needs, in weeks and money.
2. Five small bets — five things I could ship in two weeks each, from what I already know.
3. The cost of each — time and money, so I can see that failing one costs me almost nothing.
4. The stacking — how the five relate, so a winner makes the next one easier rather than starting over.
5. The order — which to run first, and what result would tell me to run the next one.
Then tell me whether the big idea survives as one of the five, or waits.