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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
📏 The sheet one proofreader wrote for himself
In the 1890s, the University of Chicago had its own printing house.
It printed the books the university's professors wrote.
Before any book was printed, a small team read every page and fixed the mistakes.
People who do that job are called proofreaders.
Some mistakes were easy, like a misspelled word.
The hard ones were different.
The same word would be spelled one way on page 4 and another way on page 40.
One page would use a comma, and the next page would not.
Which way was right?
There was no rulebook.
Each proofreader just picked whichever way looked right to him that day.
So every proofreader had to decide the same small things again and again, every single day.
One of them got tired of it.
He took a sheet of paper and wrote down the rules the printing house followed, so he would not have to think about them anymore.
It was one man's cheat sheet, for his own job.
He never meant for anyone else to read it.
But the other proofreaders saw it and wanted a copy.
Then people in other parts of the university wanted one.
By 1901 that one sheet had grown into a small booklet of rules, still just for the university's own books.
Then, according to the printing house's own history, people outside the university started asking for it.
Enough of them asked, so in 1906 the university printed it as a real book and put it on sale.
Two hundred pages, for fifty cents, plus six cents for postage.
Get this — that book is the Chicago Manual of Style.
It is the rulebook that book editors across America have followed ever since.
It has been updated seventeen times, and today it runs to more than a thousand pages.
It started as one man writing down how he did his own job.
He never tried to sell it.
People outside kept asking for a copy, and the university finally put a price on it.
⛳️ The problem
The university sold its rulebook only after other people came asking for it.
Back at our desk, we spend 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 we get ours out every week,
and we send them the checklist we use.
We never think of charging for it, because we made it for ourselves,
and a checklist for our own work does not feel like a product.
So six months go by with no course,
while the checklist a friend already asked for sits in a folder.
The Chicago proofreader never planned to sell anything either.
He wrote down the rules for his own job,
and people kept asking for a copy until the university sold it.
There is a month of work that turns a checklist into a product.
A YouTuber did it with the system he used to run his own channel.
It sold $2.1 million in two years, so here is how he did it.
🧩 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.
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
One proofreader wrote a cheat sheet for his own job.
Strangers kept asking for it, until the university turned it into a book and sold it.
Thomas built a system to run his own videos.
His viewers kept asking for it, until he cleaned it up and sold it, for $2.1 million in two years.
This hack is called Sell the System You Already Built.
Neither of them started out designing a product.
Each one wrote down how he already did his own work, and sold that write-up once other people asked for it.
So the next time a friend asks how you manage to send your newsletter every single week, pay attention.
That question is the signal.
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.
Sell the cheat sheet you already wrote.
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 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds the system you already built for yourself and turns it into something you can sell.
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use your own files if it can see them, and the example values if it cannot.
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 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 assume fundraisers at nonprofits under $2M in revenue.
- Anything I leave as an example, treat as real. Anything I delete, fill in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption.
- 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 spreadsheet tracking every grant deadline and what we submitted last time, plus a scoring sheet for which grants are worth applying for}
What colleagues have asked me to send them, and who has the same problem outside my organization:
{e.g. the deadline tracker, four times this year, and every small charity with one part-time fundraiser}
What it saves the person using it:
{e.g. probably two days a quarter, and one missed deadline}
======================== 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.