Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Paige’s course page that nobody can check
Paige is a marketing manager who sells a course to small bakeries on finding local customers.
This week, she is writing the line that describes her course, and she reaches for the same three words every time.
Thorough, practical, genuinely useful.
🧩 Her struggle:
She describes her course with words anyone could use, so a bakery owner has nothing to check.
On her lunch break, she clicks on a video that tells the true story of a nurse
who also had a new course and nothing to prove it worked,
and still sold a million dollars of it in seven months.
The nurse only wanted enough money to fix one broken tooth.
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🩺 The tooth that cost seven thousand dollars
Sarah Michelle Boes was a nurse in Kentucky, in the United States, and she had just passed her board exams.
Passing those exams gives a nurse the license to diagnose patients and prescribe medicine.
Months of studying had left her grinding her teeth in her sleep, hard enough that she broke one of them.
She needed a dental implant, and it was going to cost seven thousand dollars.
“I figured if I put together a little review course and even just earned $500, that would help pay for it.”
Five hundred dollars was the whole plan.
So in May 2020, about a week after her own exam, she opened Zoom and recorded a three-hour crash course.
She had tutored nursing students before, so she built it as questions and answers instead of a lecture.
Then she gave it away.
She already ran a Facebook group where nurses studying for the same exam traded questions.
So she sent the course free over Facebook Messenger to her thirty classmates, and asked one thing back.
“I’ll give you this course for free if you invite someone else into the group when I give it to you.”
Every new person brought another new person, so the group kept growing.
She gave the course away free like that until a hundred nurses had it.
Then she started charging twenty-five dollars for lifetime access, collected through Venmo and Cash App, two apps for sending money by phone.
Her first buyer got angry that a friend had gotten it free, and haggled her down to fifteen.
She took a thousand dollars on her first day of selling.
Then the exam results started coming back.
A nurse would pass the boards, post the photo of her passing score in the group, and say what had helped.
Nobody asked her to post it.
She wasn’t the only one.
Week after week, more nurses posted that they had taken her course and passed.
Nobody had to argue that the course worked.
Anyone could scroll and watch it working.
Three months in, sales passed a hundred thousand dollars.
Seven months in, sales passed a million dollars.
She had called the business Sarah Michelle NP Reviews.
In June 2022, a test-prep company called Blueprint Prep bought it in an eight-figure deal, meaning at least ten million dollars.
Go to her website today, and the first thing on it is not about her.
It’s one number: over ninety-nine percent of her students pass.
It doesn’t lead with her own exam score, or the hours of video, or how friendly the group is.
A nurse shopping for a course hasn’t taken the exam yet.
So she has no way of knowing whether the teaching is any good.
But she knows exactly what ninety-nine percent means, and she buys the course.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ Lead With the Documented Outcome
Sarah Michelle’s students posted their passing scores in her group.
Her course passed a million dollars in sales in seven months.
She leads with their pass rate instead of her credentials.
This hack is called Lead With the Documented Outcome.
It means measuring what happened to the people you helped, and putting that number in front of everything else.
Documented just means somebody counted it.
It doesn’t have to be a paid study.
Sarah Michelle’s came from her own students, posting their scores in her group.
She didn’t ask anyone to take her word for it.
She pointed to what happened to the people she taught.
Then she put that number first, and said nothing else about herself.
So the next time you write the line that describes your newsletter, don’t call it thorough and practical.
Report what happened to the readers who read it.
Someone who can’t judge your expertise can still judge a number.
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🛠️ Paige’s turn
So what about Paige, who describes her bakery course with three words any course could use?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it how many bakeries have taken her course so far.
Her AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Ask the bakeries that took your course how many new local customers they got, and put that number first.
She emails all three hundred bakery owners that night, with one question.
The next morning, she deletes the three words from her course page.
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🌅 Six weeks later
Ninety bakery owners have written back to Paige.
Most of them got at least twenty new local customers in the month after the course.
That number sits at the top of her course page now, where the three words used to be.
The people you’ve helped already know what your work did for them.
Most of us have just never asked them.
Count what happened to the people you taught, and put that number at the top of your page.
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 finds the one outcome you could measure and turns it into the line you lead with.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you make, who it’s for, and how you describe it now
- e.g. an online course that helps small bakeries find local customers, described as “thorough, practical, genuinely useful”What happens to the people who use it, and how many have been through it
- As far as you know. A guess is fine.
- e.g. a lot of them get new customers but I have never asked properly, and maybe 300 bakeriesWhat you could ask them in one email
- e.g. how many new local customers did you get, and how long did it take
🚀 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 page, my student list, or my sales 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 owners of small bakeries who want more local customers.
- 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.
- Adjectives are disqualified. Every claim must be a number I could actually collect, and you must say how I would collect it. Never invent a figure — if I do not have one yet, tell me how to get it.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I make, for whom, and how I currently describe it:
{e.g. an online course that helps small bakeries find local customers, described as "thorough, practical, genuinely useful"}
What actually happens to people who use it, and how many have been through it:
{e.g. a lot of them get new customers but I have never asked properly, and maybe 300 bakeries}
What I could ask them in one email:
{e.g. how many new local customers did you get, and how long did it take}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. My adjectives — every unmeasurable word in my current description, listed, with what each one is standing in for.
2. The one number — the single outcome worth measuring, and why that one rather than the others.
3. How to collect it — the exact email or form to send this week, written out, that gets me the figure.
4. What to do while I wait — the honest interim line I can use that is true today.
5. Where it goes — the three places the number replaces an adjective once I have it.
Then tell me the number I am afraid to collect, and whether that fear is telling me something.