Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Divya writes a weekly newsletter about big-batch salads and grain bowls.
She started it for one reason: lunch that isn't miserable, soggy, or beige.
She helps busy people eat well all week, without a meal-prep coach.
That's all Divya's readers want — no more Monday salad gone limp by Wednesday.
⛳️ Problem:
Divya describes her newsletter as "healthy, easy recipes for busy people."
Which is exactly what a thousand other accounts say too.
New readers can't tell why hers is different, so they don't subscribe. Brutal.
Her struggle:
She describes what she is, in the same words as everyone else, so nothing makes her stand out.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Named Enemy
Picture two ads for the same mattress.
One says "We sell mattresses." The other says "Never wake up with a sore back again."
Name the thing they hate — the sore back — not the mattress, and suddenly people care.
Funny thing is, that's the idea Stewart Butterfield built on.
He sold his company Slack to Salesforce for $27.7 billion.
Early on, he wrote his team a memo titled "We Don't Sell Saddles Here."
His point: don't describe your product — position it against the thing people hate.
Slack wasn't "a chat app." It was the escape from drowning in email.
He named the pain everyone knew — the reply-all pile-ups, the buried message, the inbox that never emptied.
Then he built Slack to stand clearly against all of it.
Describe yourself, and you sound like every rival on the shelf.
Name the miserable thing your readers want to escape, and they instantly get why you're different.
Plot twist: he never once described Slack.
🚗 So Divya tried it her way.
Remember Divya and her big-batch salads newsletter?
She'd been calling it "healthy, easy recipes for busy people" — same as everyone.
So she stopped describing herself, and named the thing she beats.
Turns out, the real alternative wasn't other food newsletters. It was the miserable desk lunch.
The $15 cold takeout, the Monday salad gone limp by Wednesday, the beige gas-station wrap.
So her new line became: "Never eat a miserable desk lunch again."
That wasn't a description — it was a stand against the enemy every reader knew.
She braced for silence.
New readers got it in one second, and sign-ups finally started to climb.
She didn't win by sounding a little healthier or a little easier.
She won by naming the miserable alternative, and standing against it.
Bingo bango.
🧸 Don't describe what you do. Name the miserable thing your readers want to escape — then stand against it.
The prompt below finds the real alternative your reader is stuck with, so you can position against it.
You just tell it what you do and who it's for.
🏄♀️ 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:
How I describe my newsletter now (the "what I am" line that sounds like everyone else):
{e.g. "healthy, easy recipes for busy people"}
Who it's really for, and what they're stuck doing instead (the painful default in their life):
{e.g. busy people eating miserable desk lunches, soggy salads, $15 takeout}
What genuinely changes for them with me (the better outcome, in plain words):
{e.g. a week of lunches that actually taste good and survive to Wednesday}
For Outcome: {e.g. a positioning line that names the alternative I beat, so readers instantly get me}
Outputs:
1. The real alternative — the actual thing my reader does instead of me (not a competitor newsletter — their painful default). Name it vividly.
2. The against-line — a one-sentence position that stands against that alternative, not a description of me.
3. Three headline options — subject lines / taglines built on "beat the bad default," ready to test.
4. The instant-clarity check — how a stranger would finish "this is for people who are sick of ___" after reading my new line.
Then name the ONE "here's what I am" description I should delete, because it makes me sound like everyone else.
That's it, my fellow rebels!
Yours 'helping you build profitable businesses 12x faster' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️