Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
⠀
Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
⠀
🙋♀️ Ruby’s four half-finished courses
Ruby is a content strategist who sells a LinkedIn writing course on the side.
Her course sold well for three months, and then sales flattened.
So instead of fixing it, she opened a new folder and started a second course, then a third, then a fourth.
Now she has four half-finished courses, and not one she would tell a friend to buy.
🧩 Her struggle:
Building a new course feels like progress to her, so the first one never gets fixed.
At a friend’s house, she picks up a magazine with the real story of a lawyer
whose first business also stalled,
and who later made more than $8 million.
She got there by selling the same product for years.
⠀
📄 The lawyer with one product
Sam Vander Wielen was a corporate lawyer for five years, and she was miserable the whole time.
She was winning cases and winning awards, and she was crumbling underneath it.
Six figures of student loans made quitting feel impossible.
Then in May 2016 she hit bad turbulence on a flight, and sat there thinking one thing.
“What are you DOING with YOUR LIFE?”
She quit that year and started a health coaching business, and it flopped.
Then she went to a wellness conference, and something strange kept happening.
Other business owners kept pulling her aside to ask her legal questions.
They were all running small businesses, and not one of them could afford a lawyer.
What they needed was contracts.
A contract is the written agreement you sign with a customer, so both sides know exactly what was promised.
So Sam sat down and wrote a whole set of contracts, and left the names and the numbers blank.
The buyer fills in their own name, their own prices, and their own rules.
Then she recorded a video for every single one, explaining what each part meant and what to type in each blank.
She put the whole thing together and called it the Ultimate Bundle.
That was 2017, and she still sells that same bundle today, at samvanderwielen.com.
Twice a year she runs a launch, which just means a week or two of emails and videos telling people they can buy it now.
The rest of the year, she is not building anything new.
She is making that one bundle better.
Get this — the Ultimate Bundle has made more than eight million dollars since 2017.
These days it brings in close to two million dollars a year.
She runs the whole thing with one full-time employee.
In all those years she has added exactly one more product, and it is built around the same bundle.
Neither of them was ever replaced.
They only got better.
You could argue she would have made more money by launching more things.
But think about what nine years of fixing does to a product.
Every confusing sentence in those contracts got rewritten.
Every video got clearer.
Every law that changed got updated.
Turns out that product is nothing like the first version she sold in 2017.
A person who launches nine products never gets that.
They get nine first versions, and every one of them still has the confusing sentence in it.
⠀
🔥 The recipe
➡️ One Product, Many Years
Sam has sold the same bundle of contracts since 2017, and every year of what she learns goes straight back into it.
That one bundle has made more than eight million dollars.
This strategy is called One Product, Many Years.
She never ran out of ideas for new things to build.
She just kept putting those ideas into the thing she already sold.
Nobody sees that work.
There is no launch day, no announcement, nothing new to show anybody.
It is the most boring way to spend a year.
It is also the way Sam built one product that brings in close to two million dollars a year.
So the next time a month goes by with no sales, don’t open a new folder and start something fresh.
Go back to the product you already have, and fix the worst part of it.
You end up with one product that got nine years of work, instead of nine products that never got past their first version.
⠀
🛠️ Ruby’s turn
So what about Ruby, who has four half-finished courses on writing for LinkedIn, and not one she would tell a friend to buy?
That night, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it all four courses and what each one has sold.
Her AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Your first course is the only one that still sells, so stop the other three and spend this year making that one better.
She moves the other three folders into one called Later.
Then she opens her first course and rewrites the lesson her buyers ask about most.
⠀
🌅 Six months later
Ruby hasn’t opened a new folder since.
Her first course has two new lessons, and every old lesson is clearer than it was.
Last month, a buyer wrote to say it was the most useful course she had ever taken.
You probably already have one thing that works.
Your next year is better spent on it than on something new.
Keep making the product you already sell better, instead of building a new one.
That’s it, my fellow anti-status-quo-ers!
Yours ‘helping you skip years of pain and frustration in your life and business’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below picks the one thing worth deepening and tells you what to stop building.
🧰 What you’ll need
Everything you sell or plan to sell, and which of them actually makes money
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. a $90 course on writing LinkedIn posts, three half-built courses, and the first course makes about $600 a month, steadily, for two yearsWhat buyers of that one ask for, and how long since you last improved it
- e.g. they want a worked example and two asked for a video walkthrough, and I have not touched it since I made itWhat you’ve been telling yourself the new thing would fix
- e.g. that a new course would get my sales moving again
🚀 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 course outline, my lesson drafts, or my sales page, 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 want to write better posts on LinkedIn.
- 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.
- You may not propose a new product, a new format or a new channel. Every recommendation must improve something that already exists and already sells.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Everything I sell or plan to sell, and which of them actually makes money:
{e.g. a $90 course on writing LinkedIn posts, three half-built courses, and the first course makes about $600 a month, steadily, for two years}
What buyers of that one ask for, and how long since I last improved it:
{e.g. they want a worked example and two asked for a video walkthrough, and I have not touched it since I made it}
What I have been telling myself the new thing would fix:
{e.g. that a new course would get my sales moving again}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The one — which product gets the next two years, with the evidence for choosing it.
2. The improvement list — what buyers have already asked for, ordered by how often it comes up.
3. This quarter — the three specific changes to make to it, and what each is worth.
4. What I stop — the half-built things, named, and what happens to each: parked, folded in, or killed.
5. The price case — what the improved version justifies charging, and when to change it.
Then tell me what the new thing was really for, and whether improving this one gives me the same thing.