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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🙋♂️ Sam’s six-month course
Sam is an operations manager who writes a newsletter on simple systems for small-business owners.
He spends every weekend trying to design a course to sell, sketching modules and planning videos,
and every version would take six months to build.
Then a friend who is starting a newsletter asks how he gets his out every week,
and he sends them the checklist he uses.
He never thinks of charging for it, because he made it for himself.
His struggle:
He keeps trying to invent a product, so he never sees the one he already has.
That Saturday, his friend replies with a link to the true story of a YouTuber
who also built something just for his own use, never thinking of selling it,
and later made $2.1 million.
Wait till you see what he was actually selling.
🧩 The setup a YouTuber built to get his own videos out
In 2010, Thomas Frank was a college student who wanted to write for a website that gave students study tips.
He got turned down.
So he took the article he had written for the job application
and started his own blog with it.
By 2012, that blog paid him a full-time income.
In late 2014 he started making YouTube videos of the same study tips, and by early 2018 he had a million subscribers.
Today the channel has more than two million.
By then he had a small team helping him, and making each video had become a mess.
Video ideas were in one place, scripts in another, filming notes in a third,
and nobody was sure which video was going out when.
So Thomas built himself a system to fix it.
He built it inside Notion, a free app for keeping notes and to-do lists, where you can arrange everything however you want.
Between 2018 and 2021, he moved his team’s whole video process into it.
Every idea, every script, every filming note, every deadline, all in one place.
He was not building a product.
He was just trying to get his own videos out on time.
Meanwhile, the questions his viewers kept sending him were all about one thing:
how to get organized.
So in 2020, he made a simple to-do list system in Notion, called Ultimate Tasks,
and gave it away for free.
Anyone could copy it into their own Notion and start using it,
and he made a video showing how.
That video was watched more than 750k times.
People who downloaded it joined his email list, a separate list just for his Notion fans.
By early 2022, that list had about 35,000 people on it.
Boom, now he knew people wanted his systems.
But selling one took real work.
His own system was full of shortcuts only he understood.
So he had to rebuild it cleanly, so a stranger could use it without him there to explain.
Then he wrote instructions for every part, and recorded hours of video lessons showing how it worked.
He took a month off from YouTube to do it.
Sponsors pay him per video, so that month cost him about $16,000.
In August 2021, he started selling it.
The exact system he used to run his own YouTube channel, now called Creator’s Companion, for anyone who made videos.
It sold 112 copies in the first month, for $12,858.
Then he went back to Ultimate Tasks, the free to-do list system, and made it much bigger.
He added a place for notes, a place for goals, and a daily planner, so it could run your whole life, not just your tasks.
He called it Ultimate Brain.
On April 5, 2022, he launched it to a waiting list of 3,201 people.
It made $88,241 in its first month.
Turns out that in about two years, those two systems brought in $2.1 million.
Ultimate Brain is still on sale today, for $129.
Thomas never sat in a room trying to think up a product.
He built a system to fix his own messy week, and used it for three years.
Then he sold that same system to people with the same mess.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Sell the System You Already Built
Thomas built systems to run his own week,
and they brought in $2.1 million in two years.
His viewers kept asking how to get organized.
So he cleaned up his own system and sold it.
This hack is called Sell the System You Already Built.
He didn’t start out designing a product.
He rebuilt the system he already used for his own work, and sold it once he knew people wanted it.
So the next time a friend asks how you manage to send your newsletter every single week, pay attention.
That question tells you people want what you built.
Stop planning the big course that will take six months.
Take the checklist you already use every week, the one you just emailed to your friend, and turn that into your product.
Clean it up so a stranger can follow it without you there to explain.
Put a price on it.
Sell it.
And if nobody has asked yet, do what Thomas did.
Give a small piece of your system away for free, and see how many people want it.
Your AI sidekick can turn your messy checklist into one a stranger can follow, in an hour.
🛠️ Sam’s turn
Let’s check in on Sam, who spends every weekend planning a course that would take six months to build.
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it the checklist he sent his friend.
His AI sidekick doesn’t waste words:
Skip the course for now, and sell the checklist you already use every week.
That weekend, he cleans up the checklist so a stranger could follow it without him.
On Sunday, he puts a price on it, and adds a link at the bottom of his newsletter.
🌅 Two months later
Sam has his weekends back, and his newsletter hasn’t missed a week.
Two hundred people read it now,
and three of them have written to ask what else he uses to run his week.
The thing you already use every week might be the product you keep trying to invent.
Sell the setup that runs your own week.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘helping you build a smart AI sidekick so you can work less and enjoy life more’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds the system you already built for yourself and turns it into something you can sell.
🧰 What you’ll need
How you actually organize your own work
- Include anything you built for yourself because nothing good existed. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. a checklist I run every week to get my newsletter out, plus a spreadsheet tracking every supplier order and when it is dueWhat people have asked you to send them, and who else has the same problem
- e.g. the newsletter checklist, four times this year, and every small-business owner who writes their own newsletterWhat it saves the person using it
- e.g. about two days every three months, and no more missed issues
🚀 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 checklists, my spreadsheets, 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 small-business owners who want simple systems to run their week.
- 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.
- Every candidate must already exist and already be in use by me. Do not propose anything I would have to design from scratch.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
How I actually organize my own work, and things I rebuilt for myself because nothing good existed:
{e.g. a checklist I run every week to get my newsletter out, plus a spreadsheet tracking every supplier order and when it is due}
What people have asked me to send them, and who else has the same problem:
{e.g. the newsletter checklist, four times this year, and every small-business owner who writes their own newsletter}
What it saves the person using it:
{e.g. about two days every three months, and no more missed issues}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The inventory — every system, sheet, template or checklist I have built for my own use.
2. The one to sell — which is most complete, most asked-for, and most portable to somebody else.
3. What tidying means — the specific work between my private version and one a stranger could use.
4. The price — anchored on what it saves them, not on how long it took me or what the tool costs.
5. The first ten buyers — who they are by name or by group, and what I say to them.
Then tell me which of my systems I have already sent to somebody for free.