Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Miles’s newsletter for every parent
Miles is a customer success manager who runs a newsletter for new dads who work from home.
Nobody hates it, but nobody needs it either.
When he skips a week, not one reader writes to ask why.
🧩 His struggle:
He chases the biggest audience he can, so he never writes for anyone in particular.
Miles clicks on a video with the true story of a refugee
who also had to choose who his product was for,
and ended up selling about $60 million of it a year.
The refugee made his first batches by hand, in a bucket.
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🌶️ The sauce he had to start making all over again
David Tran was an officer in the South Vietnamese army, and he cooked for the soldiers.
On the side, he and his family made chili sauce, the way his family had always made it.
Then the war ended, and the side he had fought for lost.
Men who had served in that army were being locked up in prison camps.
Hundreds of thousands of people got out of the country any way they could, and David was one of them.
In December 1978 he got his family onto a cargo ship called the Huey Fong.
A cargo ship is built to carry crates.
That one was carrying three thousand three hundred and eighteen people.
He reached Boston in the spring of 1979, and moved to Los Angeles soon after.
He was thirty-four, in a country he did not know, and the one thing he knew how to make was chili sauce.
So he started making it again, by hand, in a bucket.
In February 1980 he registered a company and named it after the ship that got him out.
The ship was the Huey Fong, and he called the company Huy Fong Foods.
He put a rooster on the label, because he was born in a Chinese zodiac year named after the rooster.
Then he loaded the buckets into a blue Chevy van and drove around Los Angeles selling the sauce out of the back.
He did not walk into supermarkets.
He went to Asian restaurants and Asian markets, first in Los Angeles, then as far as San Diego and San Francisco.
Those cooks knew this sauce already.
They had grown up eating it, and they could not buy it in America.
He made two thousand three hundred dollars in his first month.
And that was the entire business.
He was not trying to sell to everyone in America.
He was not even trying to sell to everyone who likes spicy food.
He was selling to Vietnamese and other Asian cooks in one part of California, who wanted the sauce they remembered from home.
He never bought a single advertisement.
He did not buy one then, and he has not bought one since.
For nearly thirty years, almost nobody outside those kitchens had heard of him.
Then the cooks’ customers started asking what was in the food.
Then chefs in other restaurants started ordering it.
Then supermarkets came asking him.
Get this — by 2012 Huy Fong Foods was selling about sixty million dollars of sauce a year.
It was growing about twenty percent every year.
That bottle with the rooster on it became the third best-selling hot sauce in America.
And through all of it, he never changed the recipe.
He never made it milder for Americans who couldn’t take the heat.
The sauce that ended up in supermarkets is the sauce he made in a bucket for Vietnamese cooks.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Smallest Viable Market
David made his sauce for Asian cooks in one part of California and never bought an ad.
He ended up with the third best-selling hot sauce in America.
Seth Godin, who sold his company Yoyodyne to Yahoo in 1998 for $29.6 million,
wrote the rule down as one question in his book This Is Marketing.
How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?
Seth’s approach is called the Smallest Viable Market.
Indispensable means people cannot do without it.
It does not mean people who would enjoy your newsletter.
It means people who would email you if it stopped arriving.
David didn’t go looking for strangers.
He sold to cooks from the country he left, who already knew the sauce.
So you stop writing for anyone who might read your newsletter, and write for the few who would miss it.
Those few are the ones who tell everybody else, because nobody forwards a newsletter they merely liked.
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🛠️ Miles’s turn
Back to Miles and his newsletter, which he writes for every parent who might be interested,
and which no reader would miss if it stopped.
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it about the one dad he has helped the most.
His AI sidekick puts it plainly:
Write every issue for dads who work from home in their baby’s first year, and nobody else.
He deletes the half-written issue about screen time for school-age kids.
Then he writes one about working from home on four hours of sleep, for exactly those dads.
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🌅 Two months later
Miles writes every issue for dads who work from home in their baby’s first year.
Last week the issue went out a day late, and three readers wrote to ask where it was.
A few of your readers would probably miss you if you stopped.
Write for the few readers who would miss you, the way David made his sauce for one group of cooks.
That’s it, my fellow renegades!
Yours ‘helping you borrow the shortcuts from people who already made it’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below shrinks who you are writing for until the work becomes indispensable to somebody.
🧰 What you’ll need
Who you say you write for now, and what you actually write about
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. any parent who works from home, and I write about sleep, screen time, and getting work done with kids aroundThe one person you have helped the most, and what they would have done without you
- e.g. a dad at a 60-person software company, working from home with a three-week-old, who would have paid a sleep coach $500 for the same adviceWhat you would need to earn from this to make it worth doing
- e.g. $2,500 a month
🚀 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 drafts, my sent issues, or my subscriber dashboard, 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 new dads who work from home.
- 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.
- The test is INDISPENSABLE, not interested. If a group would merely enjoy the work, it is still too big. Keep shrinking.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Who I currently say I write for, and what I actually write about:
{e.g. any parent who works from home, and I write about sleep, screen time, and getting work done with kids around}
The most specific person I have genuinely helped, and what they would have done without me:
{e.g. a dad at a 60-person software company, working from home with a three-week-old, who would have paid a sleep coach $500 for the same advice}
What I would need to earn from this to make it worth doing:
{e.g. $2,500 a month}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The arithmetic — how few people, at what price, would make this worth doing. A specific number.
2. The smallest viable market — that group described so precisely I could name three real people in it.
3. Indispensable or merely interesting — what this group cannot do without, versus what they would just enjoy.
4. Who I am giving up — the readers this excludes, named, so I choose it rather than discover it.
5. What changes on Monday — what I write differently, and what comes off the site.
Then tell me the sentence that says who this is NOT for.