Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Nora’s sales page that doesn’t sell
Nora is a UX designer who runs a YouTube channel teaching design to non-designers.
Her first course’s sales page opens with six modules, forty video lessons, three workbooks, and lifetime access,
because that is the part she worked hardest on.
🧩 Her struggle:
She lists what is inside the course, so readers can’t tell what their life looks like after they finish it.
Over lunch, a coworker tells her the true story of the cofounder of Slack,
who had a new product that almost nobody knew they wanted,
and still sold it for $27.7 billion.
You won’t guess what horses had to do with it.
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🐴 The memo about a saddle company
Stewart Butterfield, the cofounder of Slack, was two weeks away from letting outsiders try it for the first time.
Slack was a new tool that kept a team’s messages and files together.
Stewart’s team had been making an online game called Glitch, while working from different cities.
They built this tool for themselves while they worked on the game.
The game failed because it never attracted enough players to remain a business.
But the tool they had built for themselves worked.
So they turned that tool into Slack.
Then Stewart saw a problem.
Stewart wrote that almost nobody knew they wanted Slack because they had never heard of it.
He also wrote that too few people were shopping for a group chat tool.
On July 31, 2013, he sent his team a memo called We Don’t Sell Saddles Here.
In the memo, he asked them to imagine a company that sells saddles.
A saddle is a seat strapped onto a horse for a rider to sit on.
That company could describe the leather, the sizes and how long each saddle would last.
But those details would only interest people already looking for a saddle.
Or the company could sell horseback riding.
Then people could picture the experience first.
The saddle would become the product that helped them go horseback riding.
Stewart told his team to do the same with Slack.
The software was the saddle, the thing his team built.
The result they sold was less email, less stress and a team that could find its information.
In his words, “That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation.”
That meant changing how a team worked, instead of giving it one more chat tool.
In 2021, the software company Salesforce bought Slack for $27.7 billion.
Stewart told his team to describe Slack through the workday it could give people.
That meant less email, less stress and information they could find.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ Sell the Riding, Not the Saddle
Stewart told his team to sell what Slack did for people, not what was inside it,
and eight years later, Salesforce bought Slack for $27.7 billion.
He told them to sell less email, less stress and information people could find.
Stewart’s strategy is called Sell the Riding, Not the Saddle.
He didn’t write about what the software could do.
He wrote about what became easier after someone used the product.
So if your sales page opens with six modules, forty lessons and three workbooks,
the reader sees the saddle before they know why they would want it.
Lead with what the course helps them do.
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🛠️ Nora’s turn
Now, back to Nora, whose course sales page lists everything inside and still doesn’t sell.
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it the top of her sales page.
Her AI sidekick doesn’t waste words:
Open your page with what your buyers will make on their own, like slides and flyers,
and move the forty lessons to the bottom.
She cuts the list of modules from the top of the page.
In its place, she writes one line: “Make slides and flyers that look professional, without hiring a designer.”
She moves the list of modules to the bottom.
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🌅 Two months later
Nora’s sales page now opens with what her viewers will be able to make.
Last week, eleven viewers emailed her the first slide they want to fix in the course.
Your own sales page probably starts with a list of what’s inside.
Sell what your course helps people do, not the list of what’s inside it.
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 rewrites your description so it sells the result instead of the object.
🧰 What you’ll need
How you describe your course now, and what is actually inside it
- Copy it from the top of your sales page, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. “A 6-module course with 40 video lessons, 3 workbooks and lifetime access”, which is video lessons, worksheets and a private communityWhat is different in your buyer’s life after the course, and what they did before
- e.g. they make their own slides and flyers that look professional, instead of paying a designer or sending something that looks messyThe hard part you take off their hands
- e.g. choosing fonts, colors and spacing — I give them five simple rules
🚀 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 with no design training who need to make their own slides, flyers and social posts.
- 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.
- No feature may appear on its own. Every one must be attached to what the reader ends up with, or cut.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
How I describe what I make, word for word, and what is actually inside it:
{e.g. "A 6-module course with 40 video lessons, 3 workbooks and lifetime access", which is video lessons, worksheets and a private community}
What is different about the reader's life afterwards, and what they were doing before:
{e.g. they make their own slides and flyers that look professional, instead of paying a designer or sending something that looks messy}
The craft I take off their hands:
{e.g. choosing fonts, colors and spacing — I give them five simple rules}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. What I am currently selling — read my description back and name the object it is about.
2. The riding — what the reader actually gets, in a sentence that never mentions the format.
3. The craft I remove — the hard part I take off their hands, named specifically.
4. The rewrite — my description, selling the result, with the features attached to outcomes or cut.
5. What to delete — the lines that are about the object and only the object.
Then tell me the number in my current description that I am proud of and the reader does not care about.