Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Maya’s newsletter that sounds like everyone else’s
Maya is a hospital project manager who writes a newsletter for new team leads.
Her newsletter promises to help new team leads feel ready to lead, and so do a thousand other newsletters.
🧩 Her struggle:
She says her promise the way everyone else says it, so readers skip past it.
On her phone, she watches a video with the true story of a movie star
who also made the same promise as every cheap phone company,
and still helped build a phone company that sold for up to $1.35 billion.
He did it without making a bigger promise.
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📱 The $5 million ad Ryan did not buy
A full-page ad for Mint Mobile, a cheap phone company, appeared in The New York Times before the 2020 Super Bowl.
Ryan Reynolds was an actor and part-owner of Mint.
In the ad, Ryan explained why Mint had bought the newspaper page.
The ad explained that a television commercial during the game cost more than $5 million.
Mint had spent about $125,000 on the newspaper page instead.
Then Mint offered three months of free service to anyone who signed up during the Super Bowl.
Ryan and his advertising company, Maximum Effort, had turned Mint’s decision to spend less into the advertisement.
Mint still made the same promise as every discount phone company: phone service for less money.
Ryan showed people where some of the savings came from.
That made the low price easier to believe,
and it made a boring phone plan interesting enough to talk about.
Mint still promised cheaper phone service.
Ryan showed one way it kept costs down.
Mint spent $125,000 on the newspaper page instead of more than $5 million on television.
Later, T-Mobile bought the company that owned Mint, along with two other phone brands, for up to $1.35 billion.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Unheard Angle
Ryan skipped a $5 million television ad and used a newspaper page to show why Mint cost less,
and that made the low price easier to believe.
This tactic is called The Unheard Angle.
Mint still offered cheaper phone service.
Ryan changed the advertisement.
He didn’t need a bigger claim.
Ryan did not say “Mint is cheap” again.
He showed where the savings came from, so people believed the low price.
So you do not change what your newsletter promises.
You change how you show it.
Instead of saying “I help you start a side business” one more time,
show the Sunday night your reader spends dreading Monday, with no side business to look forward to.
The promise stays the same, the angle is new, and now your reader feels it.
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🛠️ Maya’s turn
Let’s check in on Maya, whose newsletter for new team leads makes the same promise as a thousand others.
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it the promise her newsletter makes.
Her AI sidekick says:
Keep your promise, and open each issue with a moment every new team lead lives through,
like the first time their team pushes back in a meeting.
She rewrites Thursday’s subject line to “The first time your team says no to you.”
She sends it that Thursday morning.
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🌅 Six weeks later
Every issue Maya sends now opens with a moment her readers have lived through.
She used to get almost no replies.
Now about ten readers reply to each issue, and most of them say the same thing happened to them last week.
The promise you already make is probably fine.
Keep the promise everyone makes, and change how you show it.
That’s it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours ‘proving to you that most business failures are preventable and success can be engineered’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below keeps your promise and finds an angle your reader has not heard.
🧰 What you’ll need
The promise you make, and how you usually say it
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. new team leads can feel ready for the job in their first month, usually said as “here are five tips for new managers”How everybody else in your topic says it
- e.g. exactly the same, with a list of management tipsWhat it feels like when your reader does NOT have this, and a moment this week when that showed up
- e.g. a teammate got upset in our one-on-one and I froze, and a new lead I know went quiet when her team pushed back
🚀 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 open rates, 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 have just become team leads for the first time.
- 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.
- The promise may not change. Every angle must deliver the SAME claim through a different moment, absence, objection, enemy, or scene.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
The promise I make, plainly, and how I usually say it:
{e.g. new team leads can feel ready for the job in their first month, usually said as "here are five tips for new managers"}
How everybody else in my topic says it:
{e.g. exactly the same, with a list of management tips}
What it feels like when my reader does NOT have this, and a moment this week when the absence showed up:
{e.g. a teammate got upset in our one-on-one and I froze, and a new lead I know went quiet when her team pushed back}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The promise, unchanged — state it in one sentence so we can check that nothing drifted.
2. Why it sounds familiar — show the shape everybody uses and why the reader passes it by.
3. Five angles — give me the absence, the objection, the moment, the enemy, and the scene.
4. The strongest angle — choose one, explain why it wins, and write the opening line.
5. The test — tell me what result would show that the angle worked.
Then tell me which angle I will resist because it feels too negative, and whether that is the one I should use.