Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🙋♀️ Kate’s messages to strangers
Kate is an HR manager who runs workshops on the side, for people changing careers in their 40s.
Every week, she sends a message about her workshop to fifty strangers, and most of them never reply.
They never asked to hear from her, so every message lands as an interruption, and it feels like begging every time.
The few who do reply are annoyed.
Her struggle:
She reaches out to strangers first, so her offer always arrives as an interruption.
Flipping through a marketing book at a friend’s house,
she reads the true story of a marketer who also thought selling to strangers was rude,
and later sold his own company to Yahoo for $29.6 million.
Polite beat pushy.
Here’s how.
📬 The man who asked first
Seth Godin looked at how everybody was doing email in the late 1990s and decided it was rude.
Companies bought lists of email addresses.
Then they emailed everyone on them.
Worse than rude, he thought.
A waste of money.
A stranger who didn’t ask for your message has no reason to read it, and every reason to resent it.
So he built a company called Yoyodyne that did the opposite.
It ran games, contests and treasure hunts online.
To play, you signed up, and agreed to get emails from the company paying for the game.
Nobody was interrupted.
Every single person had asked to be there.
Plot twist: people actually read those messages, because they had asked for them.
Yahoo bought Yoyodyne in October 1998 and made Seth its vice president of direct marketing.
$29.6 million.
He did not find a better way to interrupt people.
He stopped interrupting them.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Permission Marketing
Seth built a company on asking permission first.
Seth’s move is called Permission Marketing, and it’s the title of the book he wrote about it.
He didn’t send his offer to more strangers.
He only wrote to people who had already said yes.
So the offer stops being the first thing you send.
You only ever sell to people who said yes to hearing from you.
It stops feeling like begging.
🛠️ Kate’s turn
So what about Kate, the HR manager sending her workshop to strangers who never asked to hear from her?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it the question every career changer in her workshops asks first.
Her AI sidekick says:
Give away your answer to that question for free, and offer the workshop only to people who asked for the answer.
That weekend, she turns her answer into a free one-page guide.
She stops messaging strangers, and tells two online groups for career changers that the guide is free to anyone who asks.
🌅 Ten weeks later
Kate hasn’t sent a message to a stranger since.
Three hundred people have asked for her guide,
and dozens of them have written back to say thank you.
When she opened her next workshop, she told only those people, and nobody replied annoyed.
The people you want to reach will listen, once they’ve said yes.
Get a yes first, then send the offer.
That’s it, my fellow outliers!
Yours ‘helping you build profitable businesses 25x faster’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below designs the thing people say yes to — the small, genuinely useful piece
that gets people to say yes to hearing from you, before you sell them anything.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you eventually want to sell
- e.g. a $150 workshop on changing careers after 40The question your audience keeps arguing about, with no clear answer anywhere
- The one they ask you first, or ask each other.
- e.g. whether you need a new degree to change careers, or can learn on the jobSomething that took you years to learn, and now feels obvious to you
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. the eight sentences that explain a career change on a résumé without sounding like an apology
🚀 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 workshop outline, my slides, or my notes, 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 in their 40s who want to change careers.
- 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.
- Do not design a teaser. Design something that is useful even if they never buy anything.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I eventually want to sell:
{e.g. a $150 workshop on changing careers after 40}
The argument my people have that nobody has settled for them:
{e.g. whether you need a new degree to change careers, or can learn on the job}
What I know that took me years and is boring to me now:
{e.g. the eight sentences that explain a career change on a résumé without sounding like an apology}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The settled argument — the one question I can answer better than anywhere else on the internet, in one line.
2. Three yes-worthy things — each useful on its own, each buildable in a weekend, with the exact title I would put on it.
3. The ask — the two sentences that go where someone decides whether to give me their email, in my voice.
4. The first four messages after the yes — what each one gives, and what each one earns the right to do next.
5. Where the offer goes — which message the sale belongs in, and why it is not any of the earlier ones.
Then tell me the ONE thing I am currently sending to people who never agreed to hear from me.