Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Maya’s niche that went cold
Maya is a project manager at a hospital who started a newsletter on the side.
She picked AI tools for managers as her niche, because everyone said AI newsletters make the most money.
Three weeks in, she dreads writing it, and each issue gets shorter.
Meanwhile, people at work keep asking her to turn their messy plans into one-page summaries.
She enjoys doing it, and has never thought of it as a skill.
🧩 Her struggle:
She picked her niche because it pays, not because she cares about it.
One evening, a video in her feed tells the true story of a man with a good job that wasn’t right for him.
He built a $10 million business from the part of his work he loved most.
And he was a finance guy, the last person you’d expect.
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🚗 The finance guy who sat on his garage floor
Sahil Bloom came back from a walk on May 9, 2020, and sat down on the floor of his garage to write.
He was a vice president at a private equity firm called Altamont Capital Partners.
A private equity firm buys companies, fixes them up, and sells them on.
It was a good job.
He’d spent seven years climbing toward it, and in his own words he’d been “narrowly, obsessively focused on speed, on getting to the top of that mountain as fast as possible.”
Before the pandemic he was on a plane three or four days a week.
Then the flights stopped, and for the first time in years he had his evenings back.
What he did with them was odd for a finance guy.
He picked ideas he’d never had time to understand properly, learned them, and wrote them out in plain words so anyone could follow.
Most of them were about money and business, the field he’d spent seven years in.
He’d watched people get either bad advice from influencers or jargon from the experts, and he wanted to be the plain-English version.
Nobody was paying him for that.
It was the part of his work he loved most, and now he had the hours to do it.
On the walk that day he had an idea that, in his words, “made no sense.”
He was going to be a writer.
So he sat on the garage floor and wrote his first thread, a string of short posts on Twitter.
It went out to about five hundred followers.
He told his wife it was going to go viral.
She laughed.
It didn’t go viral.
What happened instead was slower.
Every day he took one more idea he wanted to understand, learned it, and explained it so a stranger could follow.
Fourteen months later he had two hundred thousand followers, and he’d written about thirteen hundred threads to get there.
He left the firm to write full time.
Today his newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle, goes out to more than eight hundred thousand people twice a week.
Get this — the businesses he built off the back of it passed ten million dollars a year in revenue.
The line he wrote about that day on the garage floor:
“The worst thing in the world is being on a good path that isn’t yours.”
He never went looking for the niche that would make the most money.
He wrote about the one thing he loved doing most.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Good-Path Test
Sahil had a good job, a good path, and evenings he spent explaining ideas nobody paid him to explain.
What Sahil did has a name: The Good-Path Test.
It asks one question: if the pay stopped tomorrow, which part of your work would you keep doing anyway?
For Sahil, two things met.
His expertise, the part people paid him for, was money and business, after seven years in finance.
His obsession, the part he loved most, was learning an idea and explaining it in plain words.
Put the two together, and you get what he wrote about: money and business ideas, explained so anyone can follow.
He didn’t go hunting for a niche.
It was already there, in how he spent his free evenings.
So when we pick a niche because we think it will make the most money, we’re starting from the wrong list.
Start from the part you love most, and your niche is already there.
Often it’s something people already ask you for, and you don’t even see it as a skill.
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🛠️ Maya’s turn
Remember Maya, and the AI niche she picked for the money?
The night she watches the video, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email,
and tells it what she does at work and what she loves doing most.
Her AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Write for new team leads, and each week turn one messy problem they face into a plan that fits on one page.
It’s what your coworkers already ask you for, and the part you love most.
That weekend, Maya rewrites her welcome email.
Her newsletter is now one-page plans for new team leads, a new messy problem every week.
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🌅 Ten weeks later
Maya writes every Sunday now, and she looks forward to it.
Ninety people read her newsletter,
and twelve of them have sent her a plan and asked for her feedback.
Your niche doesn’t have to be the one that makes the most money.
It has to be the part you love most.
Sit on the garage floor.
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
Give your AI sidekick your work and your free time, and let it find the overlap.
🧰 What you’ll need
Your work
- Upload your résumé, or type three sentences about what you do.
- e.g. Project manager at a hospital. I run the weekly planning meeting. I wrote the guide new staff get on their first day.What you love doing most
- A minute’s worth. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool, messy is fine.
- e.g. I plan my friends’ trips for fun. I read about how big projects like the Olympics get planned. I can’t stop turning long documents into one-page summaries.
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the two examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your résumé or 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 résumé, my LinkedIn profile, or my notes, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- Write in plain, friendly words, like a friend who knows my work.
- The final line is for people like me: mid-career knowledge workers who want to build something of their own while still holding a job.
- 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. If I dictated input 2, it will be messy; that is fine, do not ask me to clean it up.
- The one rule for this build: the answer must sit where what I am paid for and what I love doing overlap. A line from input 1 alone is a job. A line from input 2 alone is a hobby. Reject both.
INPUTS
1. My work (my résumé, or three sentences on what I do):
{e.g. Project manager at a hospital. I run the weekly planning meeting. I wrote the guide new staff get on their first day.}
2. What I love doing most (typed or dictated, a minute's worth):
{e.g. I plan my friends' trips for fun. I read about how big projects like the Olympics get planned. I can't stop turning long documents into one-page summaries.}
END OF INPUTS
OUTPUT
0. From inputs 1 and 2, work out the third list yourself: the things people probably ask me for at work that are not my job. Write it as five short lines, then ask me one question to confirm or fix it, and wait for my answer before going on.
1. Find every place where something from input 1, something from input 2, and something from that third list point at the same thing. List those overlaps. If there are none, say so and tell me what to add.
2. Turn the five strongest overlaps into sentences, each in this exact shape:
"I help [a kind of person] [do a thing], and I love it because [the part that hooks me]."
Under each one, one sentence on why it's mine and not anyone else's.
3. Rank the five. Put first the one that uses the most from input 2, because that's the one I won't quit on.
4. Finish with the top sentence on its own.