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Dept. Dispatch #014
Filed Under: Stitching Questions Backwards
Status: Cold, confused, and downright excited
👋 YELO! Reader
I woke up with a sentence echoing in my head like a half-remembered incantation:
“A good consultant doesn’t give you the answer. They stitch questions backward until you find it yourself.”
And isn’t that the closest thing to magic any of us can hope for?
I’ve seen it happen in real time.
That moment when someone’s face softens, like a fog lifting.
When they whisper:
"Oh. That’s what I was trying to say all along."
It feels holy.
It also feels like cheating—because technically, you didn’t do anything.
(Except you did. You asked better questions. You let them hear themselves clearly for the first time.)
Smell the metaphorical ink. Share it if you survive.
And if it moves you in any way—let me know. I’m lurking on LinkedIn, X, and Instagram. Probably too much.
Have a curious weekend.
— Sudhanshu Pai
📍 Previously in the INFO CREATOR DEPT.
In Dispatch #013, I walked you through a public autopsy of my business performance—or maybe it was a personal performance review with a revenue backdrop.
Either way, I realized something that still makes me wince:
I don’t enjoy social media.
Not in the “I’m too good for this” way.
More like the “this is slowly scraping the enamel off my soul” way.
And yet—eyeballs.
So here I am, back in the ring, negotiating the terms of my own attention span.
"Most of what you think is marketing is just unprocessed validation hunger."
—Me, but also probably Seneca if he had an Instagram
I’m testing something called The Dream 75.
It’s half outreach system, half sanity insurance policy.
Part of me wants to document it obsessively.
Part of me wants to build it in secret.
Part of me wonders if I’m just stalling.
Either way, the experiment continues.
Market research.
Even the phrase feels dusty.
You imagine a clipboard. A forced smile.
A brittle survey no one wants to finish.
But here’s the cosmic joke nobody shares on their glossy webinar slides:
Your audience is lying to you.
Not because they’re malicious.
But because most of us can’t explain why we want what we want.
(“Value resides not in the object itself, but in the mind of the beholder,” Jevons muttered, probably while ignoring his own analytics dashboard.)
So you have two choices:
Keep chasing surface answers.
Or learn to ask questions that reveal the roots, not just the leaves.
This essay was my attempt to build a better spade.
Or maybe just to prove to myself that I’m not the only one fumbling in the dark.
🎭 The Socratic Stack in Action
Somewhere right now, a creator is bragging that they surveyed 400 strangers to validate their product.
It sounds rigorous.
But it’s often just consensus theater.
Quantity masquerading as certainty.
What you actually need is pattern recognition.
And patterns don’t appear until you ask questions so sharp they draw a little blood.
Step 1: Know the Monster You’re Hunting.
Step 2: Stitch Your Questions Backwards.
Step 3: Find Your Respondents in the Wild.
Step 4: Ask, Then Disappear.
Step 5: Reflect, Echo, Distill.
Step 6: Repeat Without the Urge to Rush.
Spoiler: You’ll never see Google Forms the same way again.
🧭 Final: What This All Ladders Up To
I’ll keep this brief.
If you get nothing else from this dispatch, remember:
Every offer you build is just a question in disguise.
You’re not declaring omniscience.
You’re saying:
"I think this matters. Prove me wrong. Or prove me righter than I dared to hope."
This work is slow.
It’s messy.
It’s frustrating in the same way that any real relationship is.
But if you do it—
If you learn to listen longer than your competitors—
You’ll stop mistaking politeness for resonance.
And eventually, your audience stops feeling like an audience.
They start feeling like co-conspirators.
🗣️ Help Me Build This Thing
I don’t want this newsletter to become a polite graveyard of unopened tabs.
This is a surveillance feed from the edge of the IP rebellion.
Every dispatch is an episode—half case study, half fever dream.
I want you to help me shape the next ones.
What do you want more of?
- Should we break down failed launches in public?
- Should we dissect creator business myths nobody questions?
- Should we unpack the philosophy behind offers that actually scale?
Just hit reply. Or DM me. Or scribble a note on a napkin and leave it under a moonlit rock.
Stay weird. Stay asymmetrical.
And remember:
If you’re selling templates in a world hungry for interpretation—
You’re just another node in the course matrix.
Burn the prefab. Build the lodge. Brand your Genius.
See you in Dispatch #015.
—Sudhanshu Pai
Day 84 in the Dept.
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