Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Nate’s same forty listeners
Nate is a software engineer who runs a podcast on the side, for people learning to code after 30.
His podcast has the same forty listeners it had in March.
He puts out a good episode every week, and the forty like it.
Nobody new ever arrives, because the only people who hear about the episode are the forty who already listen.
So he makes the next episode a little better, and sends it to the same forty.
🧩 His struggle:
He tries to grow an audience from zero, all on his own, so he never reaches the listeners other shows have already gathered.
On the train home, a coworker shows him the true story of a software founder
who also needed thousands of new people to hear about his work,
and who grew for ten years without paying for a single ad.
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🚪 The marketer who launched on other people’s lists
Russell Brunson, an internet marketer, built a software company past $100 million a year in revenue without investors.
He co-founded ClickFunnels in 2014.
ClickFunnels is software that builds sales pages for small businesses.
Within about four years it was bringing in more than $100 million a year.
For the first ten years of his companies, he never paid for an ad.
In his own words: “during the first 10 years of my companies, we didn’t run any paid ads.”
What he did instead is called the Dream 100, and the name isn’t his.
He learned it from Chet Holmes, an American sales trainer who wrote about it in his 2007 book The Ultimate Sales Machine.
The idea is that the people you want to sell to already exist in groups.
Somebody else already has their attention.
You aren’t creating an audience.
Somebody has already gathered your exact readers in a podcast, a newsletter, a forum or a channel, and has been doing it for years.
Here’s what Russell actually did with it when ClickFunnels launched.
He wrote down the hundred people in his market who already had the audience he wanted: podcasters, bloggers, people with big email lists.
Then he recorded short personal videos for the people on the list, one per person.
Each video asked that one person to promote his launch to their email list.
The ones who said yes each got their own launch webinar for their readers,
and those webinars brought in ClickFunnels’ first wave of customers.
He still does the same thing for every book he releases.
Everyone on his Dream 100 list gets an early copy, and a letter offering them a share of the money from every copy they sell.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Dream 100
Russell listed the hundred people who already had his audience and asked them to send their readers to his launch.
ClickFunnels passed $100 million a year.
He didn’t build an audience from nothing.
He borrowed an audience somebody else already had, a podcaster’s listeners or a blogger’s email list, instead of finding strangers one at a time.
Chet Holmes’s Dream 100 was a list of the hundred customers you most wanted to sell to.
Russell turned it into a list of the hundred people who already have the readers you wish you had.
Russell’s point is that your readers aren’t scattered.
They’re already gathered, in about a hundred places, by somebody who did the work of gathering them.
Your job is to be useful in somebody else’s podcast or newsletter, not to build an audience from nothing.
So you stop sending your work only to the people who already follow you, and hoping strangers find it.
This week you go on somebody else’s podcast, or write for their newsletter, and reach their readers.
Your AI sidekick can draft your list of a hundred podcasts and newsletters in an hour.
The pitch still has to come from you.
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🛠️ Nate’s turn
Remember Nate, whose podcast still has the same forty listeners it had in March?
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it who his show is for.
The reply from his AI sidekick is short:
Your future listeners already listen to bigger shows for new coders,
so ask one of those hosts to have you on as a guest this week.
The next morning, he writes to the host of a bigger show for people learning to code,
and offers to share the study plan that got him his first coding job.
The host says yes.
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🌅 Two months later
Nate has been a guest on four shows for new coders.
His own podcast has about two hundred listeners now,
and most of them first heard him on one of those four shows.
The people you want to reach are already listening to somebody else.
Write down the hundred people who already have the audience you want, and ask them, one at a time, to share your work.
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 builds your own list of the places your readers already gather, and what to say when you turn up.
🧰 What you’ll need
Who you make it for, and what you publish
- Be specific. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. people learning to code after thirty who want to leave their job, and a weekly podcast on landing a first coding jobWhere you publish it now, and anybody already serving the same people
- e.g. my own show with about forty listeners, plus two bigger coding podcasts, one online coding school and a Reddit group I only readWhat you know well enough to be useful about
- e.g. how to study for a coding interview when you only have evenings free
🚀 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 episode list, my show notes, or my download numbers, 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 learning to code after thirty.
- 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 place you name must be somewhere the audience has already gathered and returns to. Do not suggest paid ads, and do not suggest building a new community.
- Do not propose pitching. Every approach must be useful to that audience whether or not anybody clicks anything.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Who I make it for, specifically, and what I publish:
{e.g. people learning to code after thirty who want to leave their job, and a weekly podcast on landing a first coding job}
Where I currently publish it, and anybody already serving this audience:
{e.g. my own show with about forty listeners, plus two bigger coding podcasts, one online coding school and a Reddit group I only read}
What I know deeply enough to be genuinely useful about:
{e.g. how to study for a coding interview when you only have evenings free}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The places — the specific places this audience already gathers, grouped by kind: podcasts, newsletters, forums, communities, events, channels.
2. The ranked ten — the ten worth approaching first, each with why that one and not another.
3. What I bring — for each of the ten, the one genuinely useful thing I could give that audience, in their format not mine.
4. The approach — a short note for the three best, written to a person rather than to a list.
5. What disqualifies one — the places that look right and are not, and the tell that gives them away.
Then tell me the one place to turn up in this week, and exactly what to bring.