Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Ben writes a weekly newsletter about growing vegetables at home.
He's good at it — his backyard plot feeds his family all summer.
He's sure total beginners can grow real food in a small backyard.
Ben's readers have never grown a thing — they dream of fresh vegetables, but are convinced they'll kill whatever they plant.
One dead houseplant a few years back, and now they've decided they just don't have the touch for it.
⛳️ Problem:
Ben has spent four months planning one big course.
He keeps rewriting every lesson, convinced it isn't good enough to publish yet.
It's still not built, and he's poured months into a bet that might flop. Brutal.
His struggle:
He's put all four months into this one course, but not one person has told him they'd actually buy it.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ A portfolio of small bets
Think about planting a garden.
You don't bet the whole season on a single seed and hope.
You plant a dozen seeds. A few sprout strong, most barely grow at all and wither away.
So you water the strong ones, and let the rest go.
Funny thing is — you can't guess the winner up front.
That's what Scott Adams did, years before Dilbert made him famous.
He tried a stack of small, cheap ventures — sweat-proof tennis wristbands, a few gadgets, computer games, even a meditation guide.
Almost all of them flopped.
Then one small bet, a comic strip he drew on the side, took off.
Dilbert became one of the most-read comics in the world, and he's worth an estimated $20 million today.
His idea: don't stake months on a single big product.
Make a handful of small, cheap bets, and ship them fast.
Most won't work — but the market shows you the winner, and you feed that one.
One big bet means you win huge or lose it all — and most of the time, you lose.
Lose it, and those months are just gone: no product, no sales, no proof it was ever worth trying. You start over from zero.
A basket of small bets lets the market pick your winner for you.
🚗 So Ben tried it his way.
Here's Ben and the big course he'd been perfecting for four months, again.
He'd bet everything on one thing nobody had bought yet.
So he broke it into a handful of tiny bets instead.
Plot twist: four would flop — and that was the plan.
Get this — instead of one huge course, he shipped five cheap little things in a month.
A $10 tomato guide, a pest-control cheat sheet, a seed-starting checklist, and two more.
Each took days, not months, and cost him almost nothing to try.
Four barely sold — and that was fine, because one took off.
His $10 "grow tomatoes in pots" guide outsold the rest ten to one, so that became his focus.
Cha-ching.
He didn't have to guess which idea was right.
He made small bets, and the market pointed straight at the winner.
🧸 Don't stake months on one big bet. Ship several small, cheap ones instead, then go all-in on the one that actually sells.
The prompt below turns your one big idea into a portfolio of small, fast bets.
You just tell it your topic and the big thing you've been over-planning.
🏄♀️ The prompt
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Update your input values in the prompt, or just run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use the example values and give you an output.
CONTEXT:
- (use what's available, fall back to the inline values)
- If my Voice Profile exists, write in that voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If my ICP / Audience doc exists, target that reader. Otherwise, use the audience below.
Inputs:
The one big thing I've been over-planning (the product I keep perfecting instead of shipping):
{e.g. a full 12-lesson course on backyard vegetable gardening}
My topic and who it's for:
{e.g. total beginners growing food in a small backyard}
What I could make cheaply and fast (small, simple things I could ship in days):
{e.g. a tomato guide, a pest cheat sheet, a seed-starting checklist, a watering plan}
For Outcome: {e.g. ten small bets to try, and how to spot the winner}
Outputs:
1. Ten small bets — ten small, cheap things I could make and ship in days, drawn from my big idea and topic.
2. The first three to ship — the cheapest, fastest three to launch this month, and roughly how to price each.
3. The winner signal — what to watch (sales, replies, shares) so the market clearly points to the one that's working.
4. The feed-the-winner plan — how to double down on the bet that takes off, and quietly drop the rest.
Then name the ONE big bet I should stop perfecting, and the smallest version of it I can ship this week.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'helping you gain years of experience without putting in the years' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️