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Hi rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Neil writes a weekly newsletter about money — for couples who just moved in together.
It started after he watched friends fight about money in their first shared year.
To him, those fights were never really about money — they were about never talking.
Neil's readers want exactly that: money handled as a team, minus the fights.
⛳️ Problem:
Neil tries to write for everyone with a bank account.
So his issues swing from student debt to retirement to crypto to basic budgeting.
Each one feels forgettable, and a year in, nobody forwards a single email. Yikes.
His struggle:
He writes for everyone, so each issue ends up feeling made for no one in particular.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The smallest viable audience
Picture a tiny restaurant with just fourteen seats.
It can't feed the whole city, so it doesn't even try.
It delights one small room so well they come back and bring friends.
Funny thing is — fourteen seats, always full.
That's the idea Seth Godin built a career on.
He sold his company Yoyodyne to Yahoo for about $30 million, then wrote 20-plus bestsellers.
For decades he's taught one backwards rule about who to write for.
His rule: trying to reach everyone is exactly how you reach no one.
So pick the smallest group you'd be proud to serve — almost too small.
Delight them so completely that they tell the next person on their own.
A giant, half-interested crowd doesn't grow. A small, delighted one does.
Serve the few better than anyone else bothers to, and they spread the word for you.
🚗 So Neil tried it his way.
Recall Neil and his money newsletter for couples who just moved in together?
He'd been writing for anyone with a bank account, and nothing was landing.
So he picked the smallest audience he'd be proud to serve instead.
Get this — smaller was the answer all along.
Before, one issue covered crypto, the next retirement, the next student debt.
Now he wrote for one reader only: couples splitting bills together for the first time.
His next issue was "How to run a 20-minute money date without a fight" — nothing else.
It wasn't for everyone, and that was exactly the point.
He ended it with one line: "Send this to a friend who just moved in with their partner."
Plot twist: he sent it anyway, sure almost nobody would care.
Twelve people forwarded it that first week — the most he'd ever had.
The tiny audience he almost called "too small" is the one that finally grew.
Ta-da.
🧸 Stop writing for everyone. Delight the smallest group, and they bring the next reader.
The prompt below narrows your audience to the smallest group you can truly delight.
You just tell it who you've been trying to reach.
🏄♀️ 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:
Who I've been trying to write for (be honest — is it secretly "everyone"?):
{e.g. anyone who wants to be better with money — students, couples, retirees, all of them}
The topics my issues swing between (the scattered range that's making each one land flat):
{e.g. student debt one week, crypto the next, retirement after that, then basic budgeting}
The one reader I most light up to help (a specific person in a specific moment of their life):
{e.g. couples in their first year living together, splitting bills and quietly tense about money}
For Audience: {e.g. new live-in couples who want to handle money as a team without the fights}
For Outcome: {e.g. a one-line definition of my smallest viable audience plus how to serve and grow them}
Outputs:
1. My smallest viable audience — one sentence naming the specific person, in their specific moment. Narrow enough that it almost feels too small.
2. The delight list — 3-5 things this exact person urgently needs that I can write better than anyone, in their words.
3. The topics to drop — the scattered subjects I should stop covering because they dilute my appeal to the few.
4. The word-of-mouth line — one shareable sentence I can add to each issue that makes a reader forward it to the exact next person.
Then explain in 2 sentences why serving this tiny group will grow me faster than writing for everyone.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'helping you build profitable businesses 12x faster' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️