Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Miles’s sales page that never answers the question
Miles is a customer success manager with a newsletter and community for new dads working from home.
This week, he is writing the sales page for his workshop.
A dad reads it with a real question, such as “will this work if I only have one hour a day?”
🧩 His struggle:
He writes every line to close the sale, so the dad’s question never gets answered.
Over breakfast, he’s reading a newsletter that tells the true story of a CEO
whose staff also took calls from people who weren’t ready to buy,
and still sold his online shoe store for about $1.2 billion.
One of those callers only wanted a pizza.
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🍕 The pizza ordered from a shoe company
Tony Hsieh was at a Skechers sales conference in Santa Monica, California.
Tony was the CEO of Zappos, an online shoe store, and Skechers was a shoe brand Zappos sold on its site.
After a night of going from bar to bar, a small group from the conference ended up in somebody’s hotel room, wanting food.
A friend of Tony’s who worked at Skechers tried to order a pepperoni pizza from room service.
The hotel stopped delivering hot food at eleven, and they had missed it by hours.
So the others dared her to call Zappos and order a pizza from a shoe company.
Zappos sold shoes.
Nobody there had ever taken a pizza order in their life.
She took the dare and put the phone on speaker, so the whole room could hear.
Tony sat and listened with everybody else.
He had nothing to do with what happened next.
She told the Zappos employee who answered that she was in a hotel in Santa Monica.
She badly wanted a pepperoni pizza, room service had shut, and was there anything Zappos could do about it.
The employee was surprised for a moment, and then asked her to hold.
Two minutes later, the employee came back on the line.
She had found the five closest places in Santa Monica still open and delivering pizza that night.
Nobody bought a pair of shoes.
Zappos made nothing on that call.
But the Skechers salespeople told that story afterwards, and Tony told it for years.
That call could only happen because of what Tony had already taken away.
Most call centers hand their staff three things.
They get a script to read, a target for selling extra items, and a limit on how long a call can run.
Tony had removed all three from Zappos.
So the employee who picked up had nothing telling her to get off the phone, and nothing telling her to sell.
In Tony’s words: “We don’t have scripts because we trust our employees to use their best judgment when dealing with each and every customer.”
He went further than that.
When a shoe was out of stock in your size, the Zappos employee had to check three competitors’ websites.
If one of them had it, they sent you there.
Get this — Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for about $1.2 billion.
By then the company had years of customers who came back because it had helped them without selling to them.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Serve-First Sale
A Zappos employee found a stranger five pizza places in the middle of the night,
and Tony Hsieh later sold Zappos to Amazon for about $1.2 billion.
This approach is called The Serve-First Sale.
Somebody asked Zappos a question, and they answered all of it, even though it had nothing to do with what they sell.
That answer didn’t make any money.
Zappos didn’t sell a pair of shoes to the person who asked for a pizza place.
What Zappos got back was customers who returned, and a story other people told for them.
So the next time you write your sales page, don’t save the good stuff for the people who buy.
Write down what they actually want to know: how it works, who it won’t work for, and what they’d be doing in week one.
Put that where anybody can read it, before they pay you anything.
You lose the wrong buyers, and the right ones trust what you say.
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🛠️ Miles’s turn
Back to Miles, whose workshop page for new dads never answers the one question they came with.
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it that question: “will this work if I only have one hour a day?”
His AI sidekick puts it plainly:
Answer the one-hour question at the top of your sales page, honestly, even for the dads who won’t sign up.
He writes the answer that night.
It works if the hour is the same hour every day, and it doesn’t if the hour keeps moving.
Under it, he adds who the workshop won’t work for, and what a dad does in week one.
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🌅 One month later
Miles’s sales page answers the one-hour question in its first three lines now.
Nine dads have replied to thank him for the honest answer.
Two of them said the workshop isn’t right for them yet.
They still read every issue.
Somebody reading your page right now has one real question.
Answering it helps them, whether they buy or not.
Answer the question your reader actually asked, even when the answer sells nothing.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘bringing you cheat codes for 25x faster business success’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below rewrites the moment somebody shows interest, so you help instead of switching into selling.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you sell, and the question people ask right before they leave
- e.g. a workshop for new dads who work from home, and they ask “will this work if I only have one hour a day?”What you reply now, and what the honest answer is
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. I say yes and send the sales page, when the truth is it only works if it’s the same hour every dayWhere you could honestly send them instead
- e.g. a free weekly schedule a former student made, and one specific parenting community
🚀 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 workshop outline, my slides, 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 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.
- Every reply you write must be useful even if the person never buys anything. If a line only works as a step toward a sale, cut it.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I sell, and what somebody typically asks me right before I lose them:
{e.g. a workshop for new dads who work from home, and they ask "will this work if I only have one hour a day?"}
What I currently reply, and what the honest answer actually is:
{e.g. I say yes and send the sales page, when the truth is it only works if it's the same hour every day}
Where I could honestly send them instead:
{e.g. a free weekly schedule a former student made, and one specific parenting community}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The honest answer — what is actually true about whether I can help this person, written plainly.
2. The reply — a message that answers it fully, including the part that does not serve me.
3. Where else to send them — the specific alternatives, named, for the cases where I am not the right fit.
4. What this costs me — the sales I genuinely lose by answering this way, stated rather than waved away.
5. What it buys me — what happens with the people I send away, and how I would know.
Then tell me the sentence in my current reply that gives away that I am selling.