This Time Next Year You’ll Be Glad You Started: A Case Study

When a stranger messaged me trying to buy a book I hadn’t written, I was confused. She said the title was This Time Next Year You’ll Be Glad You Started and that it sounded perfect for her: recently divorced, mom of toddlers, navigating a career change, and trying to find her way back to herself.

She told me ChatGPT had recommended it to her. It even described the book in detail:

The thing is: I haven’t written that book! It book quite literally doesn’t exist!

…But the demand for it clearly does? So I decided to test something…

I set up a Gumroad preorder page for This Time Next Year You’ll Be Glad You Started as a kind of micro Kickstarter. I said: if 100 people preorder this hallucinated book by July 1st, I’ll write it. If not? Everyone gets refunded. No harm, no hard feelings.

In the first 24 hours, 30 readers purchased the presale.

What began as a glitch turned into a case study.

As a consultant who works at the intersection of AI, human insight, and product strategy, here’s what this experiment is exploring:

Jenn wasn’t confused… she was motivated. She wasn’t passively browsing; she was searching for something she needed. The fact that ChatGPT served her an unreal product that felt real is the insight.

That resonance is the actionable form of validation I can imagine. What if the hallucination wasn’t the error… but the insight?

Then I got curious: could I build enough credibility around a nonexistent product to own search results for it?

So I created a low-friction, multi-surface web of links:

No ads. No SEO firms. No legacy media. Just smart, fast storytelling distributed across a few high-authority platforms.

Within 10 days, Google’s AI Overview began surfacing the book title with my product image.

My links dominate the first page of search results for the phrase. The AI summary contextualizes the phrase using my words and platforms. I didn’t just optimize a product… I tuned into an emotional frequency that resonated across machines.

This is what GEO makes possible: screw keyword stuffing and funneling. We’re not talking about search intent in the old sense, but rather PATTERN ATTUNEMENT… showing up because your story fits the shape of the question being asked.

There’s a new credibility loop forming between authors, audiences, and algorithms. I think we’re only just beginning to understand what it means.

I didn’t reach the threshold I’d set (100 presales within a month of launch) which meant I wouldn’t be producing the workbook. But I saw this as a proof of emotional product resonance more than a failure of pre-sales.

Fifty-four people were moved enough by a hallucinated title to put hundreds of dollars of real money behind it. Several readers told me that the idea gave them chills, made them feel teary, or felt “zingy.” Even though the product didn’t exist, they wanted it. Some wanted it so badly they messaged me directly, sharing their ideas about what they hoped would be in the book.

That’s pure signal.

This project wasn’t about me manufacturing demand… it was about listening for it. While the presales weren’t enough to justify the work involved to produce of the workbook, what I heard was loud enough to validate the next phase of my work: helping others tune into the unspoken shape of what their audiences already want.

And now I’ve got more data (and the GEO methodology!) to help others do the same.