Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Kate’s podcast that sounds like a hundred others
Kate is an HR manager with a podcast for people changing careers in their 40s.
Her podcast description opens with “a weekly show with practical tips for changing careers in your 40s.”
🧩 Her struggle:
She never says why she started the show, so nothing on the page is hers alone.
At lunch, she’s reading a newsletter that tells the true story of a rock climber
who also had to choose what came first in his catalog,
and later built a company worth about three billion dollars.
And he started out selling metal spikes from his car.
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🧗 The catalog that opened with an essay
In 1957, Yvon Chouinard went to a junkyard and bought an old coal-burning forge.
He was eighteen, and he wanted to teach himself to make pitons.
A piton is a metal spike.
A climber hammers it into a crack in the rock, clips a rope to it, and it holds them if they fall.
Yvon was a climber, and the pitons you could buy then were made of soft metal.
You hammered one in once, it bent, and you could not use it again.
So he made his own out of a blade from an old farm machine, hard enough to use again and again.
He set up a small workshop in his parents’ backyard in Burbank, California.
He could forge two pitons in an hour, and he sold them for a dollar fifty each,
out of the back of his car, up and down the California coast between surf trips.
That backyard workshop grew into a company called Chouinard Equipment.
By 1970, its pitons were among the best-selling things it made.
And then Yvon saw what those pitons were doing.
Climbers used the same routes over and over, so the same cracks got hammered over and over.
The rock was being scarred, permanently, by the pitons he sold.
In 1972 the company printed its catalog, the booklet it mailed out so people could order equipment from it.
The first pages of that catalog did not show pitons or prices.
They were an essay, by Yvon and his partner Tom Frost, telling their own customers to stop using pitons.
Then came fourteen more pages by a climber named Doug Robinson, on how to climb without scarring the rock.
His pages opened with this line.
“There is a word for it, and the word is clean.”
Only after all of that did the products begin.
Buy chocks instead, the catalog said.
Chocks are metal wedges a climber sets in a crack by hand, with no hammer, and takes out again.
In his own catalog, Yvon put his reason first and his best-selling pitons second, because he believed the rock mattered more.
He kept doing it.
In 1973 he started a clothing company alongside it and called it Patagonia.
Its mission statement today says it is in business to save our home planet.
In 2011 Patagonia took a full-page advertisement on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year in America.
It showed one of its own jackets under the headline “Don’t Buy This Jacket.”
Then in 2022 Yvon gave the whole company away.
He put it into a nonprofit and a trust, which is a legal arrangement that holds something so no single person can sell it.
Nobody owns the company for profit anymore.
Every dollar it earns that is not put back into the business now goes to fighting climate change.
The company was worth about three billion dollars when he did it.
Decades after that 1972 catalog, a writer named Simon Sinek put a name to this pattern.
In 2009 he called it the Golden Circle.
One line from it is the one people repeat.
“People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.”
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Why-First Pitch
Yvon’s catalog opened with an essay about the rock, and the products came after it.
He kept putting the reason first, and Patagonia grew into a company worth about three billion dollars.
This hack is called The Why-First Pitch.
Simon Sinek named the same pattern Start With Why in 2009, after Yvon had already been doing it for decades.
What you make is easy to copy: another jacket, another newsletter about your subject.
Why you make it cannot be copied, because it comes from what happened to you.
Yvon didn’t put the product first on the page that sold it.
He started with the thing he could not stop thinking about: the pitons he sold, scarring the rock.
You have one of those too.
It is the thing that made you start writing in the first place.
So the next time you write the first line of your podcast description, or your About page, do not start with what it is.
Start with what made you build it.
Then a stranger has a reason to pick yours, and nobody else can copy that reason.
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🛠️ Kate’s turn
Back to Kate, whose podcast for people changing careers in their 40s has a description that sounds like a hundred other shows.
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it why she started the show.
Her AI sidekick puts it plainly:
Open your description with why you started: in HR, you’ve watched people over 40 get turned away from jobs they could easily learn.
She deletes her old first line that night.
Her new description opens with what she has seen from the hiring side, and the show’s topics come second.
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🌅 Two months later
Kate’s description still opens with why she started the show.
Twelve listeners have emailed her their own career-change stories.
Last week, one of them wrote that the first line is the reason she pressed play.
Your page probably opens with what you make, the same way everyone else’s does.
The reason you started is the one part nobody can copy.
Put the reason you started on the first page, before the thing you sell.
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 finds the belief underneath your work and puts it in front of the description.
🧰 What you’ll need
How you open now, word for word, and what a competitor would say about themselves
- e.g. “A weekly show with practical tips for changing careers in your 40s”, and a competitor would say exactly that, word for wordWhat made you start, and what you think is broken in your field
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. in HR, I watched three people over 40 get turned down for jobs they could easily learn, and nobody teaches how to switch fieldsSomething you refuse to do, even though it would help
- e.g. take sponsorships from courses that promise a new career in six weeks
🚀 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 episode list, my show notes, or my download numbers, 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 listeners are, write for them. Otherwise assume people in their 40s who want to change careers.
- 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 why must be something a competitor could not honestly write. If any of them could paste it onto their own page unchanged, it is not a why, it is a platitude. Reject it and dig again.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
How I currently open, word for word, and what a competitor would say if they described themselves:
{e.g. "A weekly show with practical tips for changing careers in your 40s", and a competitor would say exactly that, word for word}
What made me start this in the first place, and what I think is broken about my field:
{e.g. in HR, I watched three people over 40 get turned down for jobs they could easily learn, and nobody teaches how to switch fields}
What I refuse to do, even though it would help:
{e.g. take sponsorships from courses that promise a new career in six weeks}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. What I currently lead with — read my opening back and name what it is about.
2. The why — the belief underneath the work, in one sentence, that a competitor could not honestly write.
3. The copy test — paste that sentence onto a competitor's page and say plainly whether it still works. If it does, dig again and give me a second one.
4. The new opening — why first, then what, in three lines.
5. The proof — what I already do that shows the why is real rather than stated, and what I should start doing.
Then tell me the sentence on my current page that any of my competitors could use unchanged.