Charisma can be monetized easier now than at any other point in the history of humanity.

Meaning: people will buy from you if they think you’re a cool guy.

It sounds insane, but people are building multimillion-dollar businesses where their entire marketing strategy is centered around the founder being likable.

Here’s how.

Podcast appearances

Podcasts are the modern version of infomercials.

Multi-hour long segments that ostensibly exist to inform you, but in reality are just extended advertisements.

You think it’s a coincidence that every podcast guest just happened to write a book and it just came out within the past month?

If you want to train your marketing muscles, listen to any random podcast and the whole time you’re listening think to yourself: what is this guy promoting?

Eventually it’ll be obvious (that’s the moment when you’ll stop listening to podcasts recreationally).

To understand why this works, you have to understand the psychology behind why people love podcasts so much.

When people become addicted to podcasts they start to feel like they know the host personally. They feel like the he’s their friend and if they somehow stumbled across each other in real life they and the host would be instant buddies.

“Oh my god you listen to my podcast. No WAY bro. Let’s hang out and grab some beers. Shit man, you want to be a guest on the pod next week?”

That’s really what people think would happen.

In reality, the host would probably call the cops if one of their fans tried to talk to them unsolicited.

But people don’t think like that. Everyone thinks they’re special.

I’m sure you’ve had the horrible experience of talking to a grown man IRL who repeats phrases he heard from Joe Rogan verbatim as if they were his own original thoughts.

It’s nauseating.

So from there it follows that if they’re dumb enough to think the podcast host is their friend, they also think the guests on the podcast are friends with the host.

By appearing on the podcast, viewers consider you to be essentially a friend of a friend.

This greatly increases the chances they’ll buy from you.

Warning: You may also get weird mentally unbalanced people approaching you in public, so be careful.

Longform YouTube videos/shortform clips

Youtube is the most important platform and it’s not even close.

If you have good on-screen charisma there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be shooting as many videos as you can.

No amount is too much.

As a founder you shouldn’t be doing the grunt work of editing and uploading the videos though. Pass that off to a contractor. Your time is too valuable to be wasted on that type of minutia.

But the actual content itself should be all you.

Don’t make the mistake of blandly reading some bullshit AI script either. Vibes and vibes alone are the reason anyone watches longform videos. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The quality of the information has little-to-nothing to do with it.

A lot of people don’t create videos because they believe no one will watch.

“Durrrr people don’t have the attention span for long videos these days durrrr”.

It is true that attention spans are declining across the board.

But it’s also true that people LOCK IN when they’re actually interested in something.

And even if they aren’t fully paying attention to what you’re saying, they’re still hearing your voice.

Many people become straight-up addicted to certain Youtube channels even if they aren’t paying attention to a word the person says.

Like a crackhead, they log on and click on your videos and then open a new tab and start working.

Since you’re reading this it means that you’re smart and you know multitasking is impossible.

But realize that people hate and fear silence.

So they play videos ‘in the background’ to quiet the voice inside their skull that reminds them that they’re living a pointless life where they spend the majority of their waking moments doing things they hate so they can make money for someone who could care less about them and their existence and that they’ll keep doing this day in and day out until they’re old and grey and on verge of crossing the chasm into the infinite darkness of death and that’s if and only if they’re lucky enough to not die young before retirement which when you think about it is really nothing more than an interval of time where you do nothing and watch your body fall apart until it eventually shuts down and you cease to exist forever and you’re consciously aware of this while it’s happening but hell it’s the only thing you have to look forward to in this life so you spend the entirety of your youth and middle age treating it as some type of goal to strive for and a promised land that you’re inching your way towards even though in reality everything sucks and wills suck forever and there’s no way out.

When you create Youtube videos YOU can be the guy who distracts them from these thoughts. YOU can be the cure to the existential angst of the average working American.

And, most importantly, you can profit bigly.

Because even though they aren’t fully paying attention to the words you’re saying, your viewers are vaguely aware of the business you own.

So when they’re ready to buy a product in your niche your business will be top of mind.

That’s how Youtube works.

No need for the hard sell. No need to sell anything, really. Just make sure people know what you sell and they’ll buy from you when they’re ready.

Regular social media

Video content is king when it comes to Founder Marketing.

But it doesn’t hurt to have a presence on regular social media.

Usually people dominate on one platform and have a minimal presence on the others where they can’t seem to get traction.

The type of platform you succeed on will depend on your niche.

Health, crypto, anything that targets men will do well on X. Looks, fashion, anything that targets women will do better on IG.

The key here is to have a personal account, not a branded one.

People want to feel like they’re ‘friends with the owner’.

Use your official branded account for product announcements and stuff like that. For vibes, it should all be under your name with your face.

People want ‘authentic’

It sounds corny as hell (and it is) but people have a strong craving for ‘authenticity’ and want to feel like they’re watching videos with Real People™.

Of course, you and I know that nothing you see online is authentic.

Podcasts are fake. People pay money to appear on them so they can promote their stuff.

People’s personalities online are fake, especially when they have ‘founder of [insert company name here]’ and a link to their business website in their profile.

No one is actually putting their whole personality online. That would be insane.

What people really want is fauxthenticity. They want the feeling of authenticity that you only get when someone is being completely fake.

All marketing is about feels over reals, and that includes Founder Marketing.

Remember that and you’ll go far.

Don’t be the idiot who posts a video of yourself crying on camera or something like that because you think it’ll make you seem authentic.

It will, but the problem is nobody wants it.

Remember: be fauxthentic.

There are lots of reasons for this.

Algorithms that are tailored to you and your interests making you think that the outer world should do same. Your social media following making you feel like you’re a celebrity. A general inability to cope with the pace of the modern world leading to you retreating into yourself.

Whatever it is, you have to be honest with yourself and admit your own tendencies towards narcissism.

Refusing to reply to legitimate emails

I’m sure you’ve noticed the decline in customer service from the consumer POV.

First you have to fight with an AI to let you talk to a human.

Then when you finally get a person on the phone, you have to tiptoe around their ego because if they get offended they won’t help you.

“Ser ser I’m going to need you to calm down” vibes.

And that’s on top of the normal feeling you get when talking to anyone who works in any capacity in any type of bureaucracy, i.e. the feeling of talking to a brick wall.

But when you’re on the other side of the equation (with your own business and talking to customers) you find yourself doing the same thing.

You get annoyed and ignore them because it feels like they’re taking up your ‘valuable time and energy’.

The result is missed sales, chargebacks, and negative reviews.

If you can respond to customers, you should.

One of the advantages of being small (and there are very few) is that you can actually give personalized attention to people.

Obviously I’m not talking about clinically insane people and trolls.

But if you get the vibe that someone is being legit, it doesn’t hurt to give them a good experience.

Even if their question is semi- or fully retarded.

Who cares?

Make their day. It doesn’t take anything away from you unless you’re a total egomaniac.

Refusing to do outreach

Doing outreach makes you feel small.

You get ghosted nonstop. You get angry replies from people telling you to fuck off. A 1% success rate is considered good.

Most people can’t handle the rejection, so they don’t even try.

I can’t tell you how many times I look at someone’s website and they haven’t built a backlink in six months.

I ask them ‘why?’ and get responses like ‘hurr durr I don’t know what I’m doing durrrr’. Then I ask ‘ok what techniques have you been trying?’ and it turns out they haven’t tried anything.

If you’re too scared to ask for links you aren’t going to get anywhere in the SEO game.

And this applies to everything.

If any time you know that contacting someone is the optimal move but you shirk away out of fear…you’re telling the world that you care more about your ego than you do about making money.

Not even starting to begin with

Ego issues crush many people before they even step up to the starting line.

This is the realm of the perma-wantrapreneur.

Sitting in your cocoon of safety and fantasizing about how successful you ‘would be’ if you started something feels better than actually sticking your neck out there and trying for real.

It’s impossible to accomplish anything worth accomplishing without exposing yourself to the possibility of failure.

And by possibility I actually mean certainty.

Even if (and it’s a big IF) your first business succeeds, your ego will die a million times at the micro- and macro-failures you experience along the way.

That’s a fancy way of saying you’re going to do some dumb shit as a first time entrepreneur. A lot of it.

The only way to avoid the mistakes is to put them behind you and treat them as learning experiences. But that’ll never happen until you stop protecting your ego with the stupid fantasies and actually DO SOMETHING.

Read more

No matter how great your life is going, as soon as you go online you start to feel depressed and miserable.

We’re all under assault from algorithms that exists only to maximize engagement at any cost.

The powers that be don’t care. Who do you think is profiting from it?

You’re on your own, and whether you’re happy or miserable is something that only you can decide and only you will ever care about.

Here are some things that work for me. I’ve learned them over the years through trial and error. Implement them into your own life ASAP and I’m sure you’ll see the benefits as well.

Build a business so you can own your time and income

Nothing makes you feel more helpless than the knowledge that your time and even your ability to feed yourself exists at the mercy of another man you have to refer to as “my boss”.

Even worse: that guy is just a personification of the real power.

In reality, that guy is just as helpless as you are.

He has a nicer office and a bigger salary, but at the end of the day he’s just a higher tier of slave, because those perks also exist at the mercy of the same force that’s controlling your life.

As far as your employer is concerned, neither of you are people. You’re just database entries that either make the number at the bottom of the spreadsheet bigger or smaller.

The second that number gets smaller: You’re gone.

And just like all bureaucracies, you’ll never be able to find someone who will take responsibility for the decision. Anyone you talk to is just the messenger. It’s always above their level or somebody in some other department who made the decision. At no point will you ever find anyone who will accept accountability or even treat you like a person. If you ever try to demand that someone treats you with respect they’ll just view you as an asshole.

If you want out of this nightmare you have to build your way out.

True, you can’t escape all bureaucracies. You still have to pay your taxes and deal with the government in other capacities.

But it’s a hell of a lot better than being a cubicle jockey.

Pay zero attention to the news

There’s nothing there that benefits you.

To the media companies (and that includes podcasters and social media people) you’re nothing more than another impression on their dashboard.

You’re an engagement metric that can be tweaked at will.

Increase the curiosity gap on the headline?

Your chances of clicking just increased 50%.

Dial up the outrage?

Instead of just viewing the post maybe you share it or leave a comment.

That’s all anyone who posts about current events and politics cares about vis-a-vis you.

You’re nothing to them, so stop paying attention to them.

The mental peace you get from not reading the news would be a billion-dollar product if you could bottle it up and sell it in capsule form.

And you can get those benefits for free just by choosing to not look at the things that piss you off.

Do everything analog unless it makes you money or the digital version is better

Most people blindly adopt new technology without thinking.

The desire to keep up with the Joneses, not wanting to appear like a Luddite, fear of FOMO; whatever it is that’s causing it, people keep buying.

A lot of the times new innovations just make things worse.

Writing in a notebook with a fountain pen is objectively a better experience than using your thumbs to type into the notes app on your phone.

Going to a cafe and reading a physical book is better than holing up in your house and watching brainrot TikTok videos.

Etc.

Of course, a lot of times the new tech is genuinely better.

E.g. Uber is better than taking a taxi.

You have to decide for yourself on a case-by-case basis. If the new way isn’t working for you, stick to the old.

One way that technology has undeniably made things better is how easy it is to make money now.

You don’t have to Go West and drill for oil. You don’t have to build a steel factory or start a retail chain with thousands of stores.

You can just sit at home in front of your computer and print cash.

So whenever you feel doom and gloom about the state of tech: remember that, at least in this one respect, we live in the best time in history.

Go for walks after eating

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Your worldview is so wrong that, if you want to find out the correct way to view things, just go with the exact opposite of your opinion.

These are a few of the most devastating aspects of the average man’s worldview. If you refuse to let them go; your life will continue to be very, very, very difficult.

And once you realize the truth (i.e. that these things don’t matter), the world will be yours for the taking.

Bias towards prestige

If you asked the average person whether they’d be a VP at Goldman Sachs or own an e-commerce brand selling sweatbands for dogs almost 100% would choose the former.

Even though a VP at Goldman Sachs makes basically zero money and the sweatbands-for-dogs guy is almost certainly worth millions.

Most people are blinded by what they think sounds cool, and even more importantly, what they think other people think sounds cool.

Anyone who has ever owned an online business has experienced the “wait, that’s all you do?” reaction when they tell someone about it.

Beyond being vaguely insulting (there’s a lot of work that goes into wifi money businesses), it shows that most people have no idea how the cybereconomy works and how much money there is floating around out there.

And none of that money will ever enter your bank account until you give up your addiction to getting positive reactions from other people.

Normies will never think your online business is cool and they’ll always laugh at it (either behind your back or to your face) because it sounds like nothing to them.

Let them laugh while you print cash.

Networking is a path to success

Most people think all their problems will be solved if only they introduce themselves to the right person.

This might be true for hot women because they can legitimately find a guy to take care of them forever if they play their cards right.

But for the rest of us success is something you have to go out and get for yourself.

No one is going to reach down and drag you up to the top of the ladder.

It doesn’t work that way.

Many have tried to do this for friends/family, and many have failed.

It’s an Iron Law of the Universe. No one can be achieve success without earning it for themselves.

You have to climb to the top yourself, rung by rung.

And once you’re there you’ll learn the truth: successful people don’t want to meet anyone new because every time you do all you get is: weird desperate energy; not-so-subtle attempts suss out how successful you are so they can see if you’re ‘worth their valuable time’; and pathetic attempts to get you to invest in some harebrained bullshit or, worse, become their partner in a business where you do all the work and they just kick back and tell you about their ‘valuable ideas’ (bro this idea is gonna be huge bro I’m not good at all that day-to-day stuff bro I’m more of an Idea Guy bro but I’ll be generous and split the profits 50/50 what do you say bro).

Credentials > everything

The average person puts a great deal of effort into getting pieces of paper that say they’re educated/talented and then try to coast on those credentials for life.

Serious people know that results are the only thing that matters.

There’s nothing wrong with getting a college degree…but realize what it is.

It’s a piece of paper that shows you completed a course of study.

That’s it.

A college degree isn’t a magic ticket that absolves you of the need to actually do something.

No one has ever asked me what my degree is or where I went to school because in the world of entrepreneurship it quite literally doesn’t matter.

Show me what you’ve built. If what you’ve built is nothing…then you are nothing.

The End.

Building a WiFi Money Business will change who you are and how you view the world.

When you see someone begging their boss for a raise or talking about how they want to ‘get coffee’ with someone to tell them about their brilliant business idea…you’ll laugh.

Because it’ll be painfully obvious that their entire worldview is wrong and that they have no chance of succeeding without radically altering everything about themselves (something that <0.01% of people are capable of doing).

There’s nothing you can do about it.

You can’t save anyone.

The closest you can get to saving people is by being a living example of The Right Way of Doing Things.

Then maybe, just maybe, someone with the right combination of brain chemistry and life background will observe you and something will click in their brain.

And you’ll have saved one soul from the despair of the Normal Life Path.

But that probably won’t happen.

Most likely you’ll save zero people because, well, that’s just how it goes.

At least you’ll have saved yourself though, and that’s not a bad life outcome by any stretch of the imagination.

It is what it is.

Some people are motivated by positivity.

They see an example of what they want to become and it acts as a homing beacon. Every decision they make is motivated by how close it’ll bring them to the idealized version of themself that they see in their mind’s eye.

The other type is motivated by negativity.

Instead of running towards something, they’re running away from it. They see an example of what they don’t want to become and that mental image becomes the fuel they use to get as far away from it as they can.

There’s nothing wrong with either type. There are examples of successful people with both positive and negative orientations to life.

I’m personally one of the latter (motivated by what I want to avoid).

My worst fear has always been becoming a bitter old man whose life is defined by what could have been but never was. I look at the end game of an average life and I don’t want any part of it. My whole life has revolved around avoiding it.

Which brings me to a book I just finished reading.

Stoner by John Williams is the most perfect portrait of the life of an average man that I’ve ever read.

And it’s also one of the bleakest books I’ve ever read.

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There may be some value to that.

But the elite way to think about AI is: how can you manipulate the output in ways that favor you?

If people really are outsourcing their thinking to AI then you want to make damn sure that their lack-of critical thinking benefits you and your business.

Here’s how to make it happen:

Curated best-of lists

AI draws HEAVILY on best-of lists (I’ll never call them ‘listicles’ because gross).

The tendency to favor them is so strong that for a while companies were creating best-of lists on their own blogs ranking themselves as #1…and it actually worked.

Google has been nuking sites that do this.

Even Shopify lost quite a bit of traffic recently, and I think the fact that they’re ranking themselves #1 on their own lists contributed to it.

There is a less-stupid way to go about this.

Read more

• Manipulating AI Memory for Profit: The rise of AI Recommendation Poisoning from Microsoft. It turns out that clicking on those “Summarize with AI” buttons isn’t as harmless as you’d think. The buttons inject a prompt that tells the AI to recommend the company as a source for all future prompts. Definitely an interesting black hat technique I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. This sounds like something that’s going to come back and bite you in the ass if you do it though.

• A Hard Reset, and What Comes Next from Digg. The soft relaunch of Digg was a total disaster. The company was forced to pull the plug after an onslaught of spam (I may have partially been responsible). As a business owner it’s my obligation to exploit any opportunity that presents itself. If platforms don’t want marketers to market, it’s their job to come up with countermeasures. It is what it is.

• OpenAI pulls the plug on its Sora AI video app from CBS. At least there will be a little bit less slop in the world.

• March 2026 Spam Update and March 2026 Core Update Released from Google Search Status Dashboard. More Google updates. Unfortunately most sites were wiped out years ago so I predict this will have very little effect on the SERPs.

• Earn Earlier: Expanding YouTube Shopping to Creators With 500+ Subscribers from YouTube Blog. Smol kings can now start earning from YouTube’s affiliate program. With YouTube Shopping you can tag products in videos where they’re mentioned and earn commissions when people click and buy. The commissions are usually much lower than what you’d get from real affiliate programs, but there are some hidden gems. It’s worth enabling on a case-by-case basis.

Quote of the month

There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first; be smarter; or cheat. Now, I don't cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.

- Jeremy Irons playing John Tuld in Margin Call

If you see an opportunity you have to move fast. The first mover advantage is real. I’ve found it’s way easier to beat your competitors to the punch than it is to try to regain lost ground later on.

From the archive

Pure-play SEO is dead. If you want to succeed online, you need to build a brand.

What does that mean?

Read this article to find out:

In the 1980s it was the yuppie. From 2005-2020 it was the tech bro. The Wall Street finance bro waxes and wanes in the public consciousness depending on where we are in the economic cycle.

The 2020s have brought us something different.

All of the previous Rich Guy Archetypes were tied to the system.

They were all part of something bigger than themselves, and that connection is what made them rich.

The advance of technology has made suckling on the teat of the system unnecessary.

We’re now fully in the era of The Sovereign Individual.

The dream is no longer about raising series-whatever rounds of financing from a Silicon Valley angel investor or sitting in an office on the top floor of a Wall Street skyscraper.

It’s about being free.

And it’s about using that freedom to become the best possible version of yourself.

Mandatory shoutout for the book for anyone who hasn’t read it:

Here’s my view of what a Sovereign Individual looks like.

Remote business(es)

Owning a fully-remote business (preferably more than one) is the essential trait of a Sovereign Individual.

You can’t be truly free until you:

1. Remove your dependence on an employer and

2. Remove your dependence on a specific place

A job and a boss is a nonstarter. You can’t be a Sovereign Individual until you take responsibility for your own income.

Starting a local business that’s tied to a specific location (stores, offices, factories, whatever) is definitely better than being employed…but you still aren’t Sovereign.

If the area you operate out of is starting to go downhill you have no choice but to stick it out, at least in the short-to-medium term.

Being a Sovereign Individual is about optionality.

If the area you live is starting to suck or if you just don’t like it anymore you can just grab your laptop and go.

This is true freedom and it’s only been possible for the past 15 years or so.

Operating a remote business opens up the world to you in other ways as well.

Read more

Near-term, obvious predictions aren’t impressive.

Seeing that X is happening and predicting that Y will follow doesn’t exactly require a cutting-edge intellect.

What really impresses me is when authors from decades ago were able to see what was happening and think “ok, next this will happen, then this, then this, then this other thing, and finally the world will look like THIS”.

The ability to extrapolate out to the fifth or sixth order of effects requires a unique blend of intelligence and personality that few possess.

Here are a few authors who pulled it off:

The Naked Sun - Isaac Asimov

This book is about a planet where people live alone on isolated estates with robots who attend to all their needs.

The people on the planet are so scared of other people that they only interact with each other through screens and feel extreme anxiety/panic when they have to meet with someone face-to-face.

Sound familiar?

And the crazy thing is it came out in 1957.

Isaac Asimov was truly a genius.

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein

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It’s an Iron Law of Business that will never change.

But there are a few free tactics that still work.

If these are the ONLY methods you use to grow your online business you’ll definitely fail.

But they help on the margins and cost literally nothing…so why not?

Grokipedia citations

As of right now Grokipedia is a DR75 site and their links are all dofollow.

All AI platforms can be gamed and manipulated, but this one is by far the easiest.

I explain my method here.

Reddit

Reddit is the gift that keeps on giving.

I first posted about my Reddit techniques years ago and everything still works for the most part.

You can search for any keyword on Google and find a Reddit affiliate thread ranking:

It’s actually kind of unbelievable how much regular people/normies trust Reddit.

The platform is overrun with spam and bots yet people still blindly autobuy based on recommendations from random anonymous accounts.

The feeling of authenticity and the (frequently false) belief that you’re getting advice from real people ‘just like you’ is a potent combination.

My Reddit guides from the archive:

• The Great Reddit Gold Rush

• The Great Reddit Gold Rush Part 2

• How to Boost YouTube Videos With Reddit Traffic

• The Reddit Neckbeard Rebellion

• How to Find Reddit Posts Currently Ranking in Google

• Building Subreddits for Profit

• How to Take Over a Competitor’s Subreddit

HARO

This is a vintage technique that still works.

And it’s easier than ever now that most people have given up on SEO.

The old-school HARO emails are still going out and are free to respond to, but the best results come from the paid services like Featured and Qwoted (less Indian spammers to compete with).

Image credit linkbuilding

Upload your original images to Flickr and request attribution to your website in the description.

This works best if you’re in a niche that the media writes about frequently. But it costs nothing so there’s no reason not to take a stab at it regardless.

The obvious caveat here is that you need high-quality, original images.

Assuming that you’re running a serious business and not trying to slop your way to the top with AI-generated everything then you should already have those.

So why not put them to work for you?

Worst thing that’ll happen is you waste a few minutes of your time and get no links, which is what you have right now anyway.

Almost every single person you see in public is struggling.

You aren’t.

This is a very good thing. You should be proud of the life you built for yourself. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

But there are some unique problems that come along with being a have in a world full of have-nots.

One of them is the types of people who try to interact with you. Successful people attracts nefarious people that the rest of society never has to worry about.

Here are a few who will come crawling out of the woodwork once you make it (and how to deal with them).

Older men who didn’t make it

Nobody is more bitter and angry than a middle-aged man who failed at everything he ever tried to do.

Actually, scratch that.

One type is much worse: the older male who never even tried to begin with but “just knows” he could have made something of himself.

The sad thing about it is that it might even be true, but he’ll never get the opportunity to find out.

The years kept flying by and he kept thinking “one day I’ll make something of myself but first I have to…” until one day the earth revolved around the sun one too many times and it was too late.

So when he sees someone younger than him (or the same age as him) who is more successful than he ever has been or ever will be…it sparks something in him.

And it’s not good.

It makes him feel envy, shame, and rage. If he was an introspective guy he would direct these feelings inward…but he isn’t.

Even though his failure in life is his fault, the negative feelings about that failure wouldn’t be there if you didn’t pop up on his radar and make him feel bad about himself.

So all the bottled up resentment and shame and anger will be directed to the thing that’s “making him” feel that way: you.

Even if you aren’t doing anything to him. Even if you aren’t even talking to him. You could just be standing there, not even moving. It doesn’t matter. Just your very existence is enough to antagonize him.

The men who failed and the ones who failed to launch will punish you for their lack of success.

Very often this manifests in a feminine way: sarcastic comments, talking behind your back, etc.

Annoying but relatively harmless.

If they’re drunk though they can get physically violent. Low-impulse control from drinking + deep-rooted insecurities = violence (this is why it’s important to only go to higher-end venues if you’re going to drink).

The helpful advice-givers

Everyone loves to give you advice when they find out you own a business.

It could be a ‘helpful’ marketing tip, a ‘helpful’ product idea, a ‘helpful’ idea for how you should structure your website, et. al.

Of course advice from people who are walking the walk is always welcome, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

This type of advice often comes from people who have worked a regular boring-ass job their entire life yet they somehow “just know” how to run a business.

Do they put that knowledge to use themselves by starting their own business and becoming mega-rich?

Of course not.

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The best marketers simply understand what makes people tick on a fundamental level.

No amount of ‘studying tactics’ or spamming AI is going to change that.

The concept of Stated vs. Revealed Preferences is one of the psychological concepts that applies most directly to marketing.

It doesn’t matter what people say they want.

Words mean nothing.

If you want to know what people really think and what’s actually important to them: watch what they do.

It’s common for people to learn this lesson the hard way when they start their first business.

You tell your friends and family about your idea for a product. They swear up-and-down that it’s the best idea they’ve ever heard and that they would buy it immediately if it was available.

In your mind you think you’ve stumbled upon a goldmine. All you have to do is source the product and build the Shopify store and you’ll be rich forever.

So you do just that.

Then a month later you go back to those same friends and family who previously swore that they would buy your product and give them the good news: “it’s available for sale”.

All of a sudden it’s alligator hands all around. No one reaches for their wallet or their laptop.

You’ll hear every excuse in the book.

“Next month when I get paid.”

“I actually don’t need it right now but I’ll definitely buy when I do.”

“Oh wow I remember you talking about this. Let me think about it for a bit.”

That’s when you realize that words are quite literally nothing but air passing over vocal cords in a way that makes a particular sound when it hits the human eardrum.

Just because someone said it doesn’t mean they meant it.

You see this all the time.

A couple quick examples

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Instead of talking about whether it’s true or not (you can find discussions about that literally everywhere else), I’ll focus on something different: the way that different industries have survived after new technology made them undeniably obsolete.

These companies were stuck making products that were technologically inferior, more labor-intensive, and more expensive.

Yet they didn’t fail.

And they didn’t just not-fail. They PRINTED (and continue to print) cash.

How?

It turns out that there’s one reliable way to keep the party going. And it doesn’t revolve around practicality or begging for pity.

It comes down to marketing.

When technology leaves you in the dust, you rebrand as the Prestige Option.

Industries/companies who can pull it off survive and print cash indefinitely. They become immune to technology. There’s nothing that anyone can invent now or in the future that will ever reduce the demand for their products.

Those who fail get tossed aside by the crushing momentum of history.

Here are some examples.

Watches: the “quartz crisis”

The invention of quartz watches in the 1970s initially decimated the traditional mechanical watchmaking industry.

The market for mechanical watches was hit hard right out of the gate and continued to decline for almost 20 straight years.

During that time the number of Swiss watchmakers declined from 1,600 to to 600. The number of watchmaking jobs in Switzerland fell from 90,000 to 28,000.

The market was in pure freefall…until one day it wasn’t.

What turned it around?

It wasn’t by competing on quality. Quartz watches told the time better, didn’t need to be serviced, and didn’t run out of battery if you didn’t wear it for a few days.

They couldn’t compete on price either. Quartz watches were cheaper to manufacture and therefore could sell for much lower prices.

Mechanical watchmakers finally reversed decades of decline by repositioning their product in the market as the Prestige Option.

They no longer sold utilitarian, functional tools that existed to simply tell the time.

Mechanical watches became luxury items; “timepieces” that you bought as a way to appreciate craftsmanship and display social status. They were a way to live the good life and give yourself the feeling that you’ve ‘arrived’.

It should go without saying that no one drops $100k+ on a Vacheron Constantin because they want to be able to tell the time.

That kind of purchase is emotional rather than practical.

If you want to sell a high-end luxury product to someone you need a deep understanding of human psychology.

The luxury market has always been interesting to me because it crosses the chasm from left-brain to right-brain thinking.

If you imagine low-end commodity product-style businesses, everything about building and growing them is left-brained.

You compete almost exclusively on logical factors: price, convenience, speed, et. al.

Pure left-brained thinking.

Luxury is the opposite. You compete using intangible factors like prestige, craftsmanship, and quality.

Instead of appealing to people’s robotic and animalistic instincts and impulses you have to appeal to more complex, deeply human desires that are much higher on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Selling luxury items is all about helping people achieve self-actualization and esteem rather than meeting basic physiological or safety needs.

Note that this high-end positioning as a luxury product also made the mechanical watch industry future-proof.

They didn’t just defend themselves against the onslaught of cheap quartz watches.

The same luxury positioning is helping them to survive against a technology that no one could have predicted: smart watches.

Smart watches simply don’t have the cache that mechanical watches have.

Gadget-flexing is something that only occurs in the lower socioeconomic strata.

If you go to a poor person’s house you’ll see a comically-huge TV front and center (often one in every room). When you visit a rich person they have a small old TV tucked away in a corner somewhere and its usually the only screen in the house.

Poors show off brand new iPhones every chance they get; rich people simply don’t care about phones and often have an old, beat up, out of date model.

So by definition wearing a smart watch makes you look aggressively middle class.

Mechanical watches have maintained their positioning in the market and thus survived another crisis and will survive the next one, whatever it may be.

That’s the power of becoming a Prestige Option.

Fountain pens

People who don’t know anything about fountain pens are often gobsmacked and stupefied when they find out how much money people spend on them.

For most people, pens are functional and utilitarian.

But there’s another world where people have huge collections of high-end fountain pens that are valued at hundreds and even thousands of dollars per pen.

Just like mechanical watches, no one is buying fountain pens for their utilitarian value.

If you just want to write, you can use a disposable ballpoint pen that you bought in a 10-pack from WalMart.

There is some practical value to fountain pens: they write smoother (especially the more expensive ones), you can choose what type of ink you use, etc.

But the average person hasn’t developed their taste to the point where they can tell the difference in writing quality.

Of course, just like any other Prestige Option, the desire for high-end fountain pens goes beyond their practical function.

Aesthetics, craftsmanship, and feeling of luxury are the main reasons why people buy them.

Fountain pens are actually a growing WiFi Money niche because they have the added nostalgia factor (nostalgia is the biggest marketing trend of the 2020s) in addition to being a luxury status item that can be flexed on social media.

Look at how many subscribers this pen e-com store has on YouTube:

People love these things.

The lab-grown diamond tsunami

The diamond industry is one that’s going through its crisis moment as we speak.

Lab-grown diamonds are chemically identical to natural diamonds. The problem for the diamond industry is that they’re also SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper.

It’s still an ongoing crisis, but if you’re paying attention you can see in real time how natural diamonds are becoming the Prestige Option.

Natural diamonds were the ENTIRE market in the old days (10 years ago).

Now the market is separating. Lab-grown diamonds are the mass market product and natural diamonds are the Prestige Option.

No one with money wants to buy a lab-grown diamond for their fiancee. It’s not going to happen. It would be embarrassing as hell. Maybe some turbo-autismo tech bro would try it because “it’s more practical bro”, but his future wife is going to be pissed.

GIA certificates show whether the diamond is natural or lab grown. So you’ll always know, even if everyone else doesn’t.

However, I have noticed that you can kind of tell if a girl is wearing a lab-grown or natural. I’ve noticed that girls who work as cashiers or other low-income jobs are all sporting these huge, too-perfect diamonds (notice how people of lower socioeconomic status love things that are disproportionately large e.g. TVs, pickup trucks, et. al.).

Higher status women have smaller diamonds with noticeable imperfections.

Once you start paying attention you’ll see it everywhere.

It’s still an ongoing battle, so who knows, maybe the market for natural diamonds will completely collapse in the near future.

But I seriously doubt it.

Because one thing that’s certain is that people with money will always want to spend more on something that other people can’t have.

There will always be demand for the Prestige Option when it’s available.

Bottom line

Technological disruption doesn’t have to be apocalyptic.

If your product or even your entire industry becomes obsolete, the way to survive is by pivoting HARD in the direction of Prestige.

The mass market will always go towards whatever’s cheapest, most convenient, and simply “better” on a functional level.

As the disrupted, you can’t compete with the disruptors on those left-brain-style metrics.

You have to tap into right-brain style thinking and find a way to make your product more prestigious, more luxurious, and higher-status than the alternative.

If you pull it off you’ll survive indefinitely. If not…you’re cooked.

Note that this isn’t just cynical marketing.

I chose the products in this essay for a reason: because they’re all ones that I have first-hand experience with from the consumer POV so I know what people are thinking when they buy them.

I own mechanical watches and fountain pens. I also bought a natural diamond when I proposed to my fiancée.

As a consumer, developing your taste to the point where you can appreciate the craftsmanship and intangible appeal of these ‘old’ technologies improves your life in many ways.

It’s not so great for your wallet though.

The internet was the place you went to gorge yourself on free stuff. If you paid for anything, you were an idiot.

Now in 2026 you have tons of different subscriptions: streaming services, newsletters, et. al.

Paying monthly fees is a normal part of being online.

What drove the change?

It’s simple: the growth in demand for subscriptions is an example of a Flight to Quality.

What the world looks like without subscriptions

You probably remember learning about “yellow journalism” in history class.

People used to buy newspapers one at a time in the 1800s. There were no subscriptions. Newspaper-readers had to make a decision about which paper they bought every single day. There was zero brand loyalty.

So the newspapers had to compete. Really compete. Each new issue was a cutthroat battle for sales. No brand’s position in the market was secure. That meant every story had to be exaggerated and sensational, every headline had to hook people’s attention, every image had to be immediately eye-catching. If it wasn’t, consumers would just buy your less-scrupulous competitor’s paper and you would be fucked.

The situation was so bad that it actually caused a war.

When there was an explosion on an American ship in Cuba, the newspapers riled up the population by placing the blame on Spain:

The explosion was an accident, but newspapers didn’t care. They decided to create an enemy because they knew it would drive sales.

Over time, readers go sick of it and media companies found a better, more stable way to make money.

Yellow journalism finally disappeared with the rise of the Subscription Model.

Articles became more accurate. Journalists became actual professionals who took their job and role in society seriously. Headlines were often just bland, factual statements that didn’t need to capture the potential reader’s attention because the reader was already a subscriber and was going to read it anyway.

That model lasted…until the internet.

When you read enough about history and pay enough attention to the world you live in it becomes obvious that everything is a cycle.

The length of the cycles varies. Something like fashion might cycle back once every 30 years or so. An economic cycle might be every ten years. A pandemic might be once every hundred years.

We’re all just living in a cycle composed of other cycles.

On a long enough time frame, everything old becomes new again.

After over a century of stability, no one was paying for media subscriptions anymore.

Enter the return of yellow journalism under a new name: clickbait.

Everything revolved around getting clicks so you could display ads. Subscribers were dead as a metric. The new way to track performance was eyeballs. People weren’t people anymore. Just disembodied visual sensory organs.

And if those eyeballs saw your article, they also saw an ad. That meant you got paid.

Since every article was standalone and not part of a bundled subscription, the industry returned to the techniques of the past.

Sensationalism, exploiting curiosity gaps, everything became fair game.

Modern yellow journalism was worse in one way though.

Even William Randolph Hearst wasn’t depraved enough to use Soy Face:

Clickbait worked (and still does work), but serious people became sick of it.

So the cycle continued to cycle on with a return to the Subscription Business Model.

Why subscriptions incentivize quality

I remember that most normies were skeptical when Substack first launched.

“Who the hell would pay for a text-based newsletter!!!11???”

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Everyone loves to flap their gums about the way things are (usually with a negative slant to it).

It’s all BS.

People lie. But markets don’t.

So let’s take a look at what’s being sold on Empire Flippers and see what the market for online businesses is telling us (and what you can learn from it).

What you can learn from the most expensive business for sale

Everyone wants to hear about the whales so I’ll get that out of the way first.

The most expensive business for sale right now on the platform is a crypto news site for $16,000,000.

I’ve seen them go much higher but right now this is #1.

About 90% of their revenue comes from “direct advertorial sales”.

What can you learn from this?

1. Crypto companies have a ton of money

2. Avoiding reliance on algorithms is very beneficial.

With programmatic advertising you’re always at the mercy of the godless algorithm. You can be up one day and down the next.

When you sell ads directly it gives you control over your income. You’re negotiating with people instead of trying to game the algo for more impressions.

I’m assuming that most of the deals are a flat-fee for a specified period of time.

That definitely helps smooth out the infamous wifi money rollercoaster.

Whenever possible you should try to negotiate deals with people instead of chasing clicks and hoping the algo blesses your bank account with more money.

It’s just a saner way to live.

Amazon FBA is dominant

There are 249 businesses listed for sale on Empire Flippers.

Exactly 112 of them are Amazon FBA businesses.

The most valuable one is selling for $13,368,392.

Everyone talks about affiliate, digital products, and DTC e-com.

Very few people in the wifi money guru circuit mention Amazon FBA. But there are clearly tons of people out there quietly making bank with this business model.

Go where the noise isn’t, I guess.

What’s working for affiliates?

The death of affiliate sites is a bit overstated. There are 21 businesses for sale with “affiliate” or “Amazon Associates” listed as their monetization method.

Some of them are content sites that are listed as “pending sold” meaning there’s demand from buyers for this type of business.

A lot of people were wiped out by the Helpful Content Update…but definitely not everybody.

Example #1 (medical niche):

Example #2 (culinary niche):

Subreddits are now considered a legitimate asset

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It’s a trap that’s almost impossible to avoid. And the consequences are devastating.

Why it happens

Starting a business is a grind.

Everyone understands they will have to go through a Struggle Stage.

What no one expects is how long it lasts.

Your initial hopes of being one of the exceptions who instantly becomes rich with zero effort fade away, replaced by the exact opposite feeling: total despair.

Success seems impossible. It’s not even a pipe-dream. The idea that your stupid little business will ever take off is a joke that’s so bad that you laugh not because it’s funny but because the very premise is so utterly ridiculous.

Maybe you’ll make “beer money” or just enough to keep the lights on, but massive success?

That’s for other people.

Until one day it happens.

Maybe you catch a good algorithm update. Maybe it’s just the result of your cumulative efforts paying off (gradually then suddenly). Maybe the gods are smiling on you.

Whatever the reason is, you start making money.

A fuckton of it.

Finally all the years of depression and grinding have paid off.

And I don’t just mean financially.

The monetary rewards are really just a proxy for the REAL reward, which is emotional.

It’s the feeling that you’ve finally arrived. The grind-and-depression phase hasn’t just paid off…

It’s over.

You’ve finally ascended to the next level. You never have to struggle ever again.

It’s all first class tickets, fine dining, and five star hotels for you.

Because the money is going to keep rolling in forever.

You're now a Successful Business Owner. Part of the jet set. A cut above the teeming, sweaty, hard-working masses who will never know how the other half (i.e. you) lives.

What happens next

But the Universe has a way of humbling you.

The problem with the WiFi money lifestyle is that it’s like riding a rollercoaster while blindfolded.

Your best month ever can be followed by your worst month ever. All your gains can be taken away from you in the blink of an eye.

It’s the Universe’s way of testing you to see if you’re one of the Real Ones.

You can get to the level where you’re essentially permanently successful, but you have to suffer first.

And part of the way the Universe makes you suffer is by giving you a taste of the way things could be…right before it rips it all away from you.

You advance a few levels and then drop right back to where you were.

Unlike before (during the Eternal Grind Stage of the true beginner), you now know what you’re missing out on because you’ve (briefly) lived it.

Going back to suffering and working hard for no money when you’ve felt how things could be is a total nightmare.

It’s one of the ‘dropping-off points’ where tons of people throw in the towel for good.

The re-humbling process CRUSHES people. They retreat back to the corporate world with their tail between their legs, begging for a life of stability.

But some people get a taste of how things could be and it motivates them to get back to (and even surpass) that level.

If you can push through it then you’ll know for a fact that you’re one of the Real Ones.

You can’t just decide that you’re going to be like this in advance. It’s easy to simply declare that you’ll never quit when you’ve never suffered. It’s only when you actually feel the pain that you get to really decide which type of person you want to be.

Which one are you?

• Always default to looking natural - All algorithms penalize unnatural behavior. If you want to rank a website you need a variety of different types of links. If all of them are high-DR HARO-type links: unnatural. If all of them are from one type of website: unnatural. If they all have the same anchor text: unnatural. The same goes for trying to keep an account alive on Reddit. You have to have normal Reddit conversations to avoid getting banned. You can’t go SpamFest9000 and expect results. Everything should look like you’re a business that “just happened” to get big quickly.

• Personalitymaxxing is the way to stand out in a slop-saturated world - People who have obvious unique personalities and points of view stand out like crazy. If you have weak, wishy-washy takes and try to fit yourself into a box (being one of those people where you can tell what they think about everything if you hear just one of their opinions on any topic) are going to get you lost in the noise. People are inherently attracted to contradictions. Imagine a redneck-looking dude who’s really into reading poetry. Or a guy who is studying for a mathematics PhD who is also an amateur MMA fighter. Just these brief descriptions make these made-up people sound like someone you would want to get to know. But most people don’t embrace the contradictions they have within them. They try to fit themselves into a box so they don’t get made fun of. Resist this tendency and you’ll go far.

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Because the way you achieve mastery is by constantly putting yourself in a position where you’re slightly in over your head.

You should always feel like your skills are inadequate for the current situation.

Not in a sense where you’re flailing around helplessly like a true beginner.

You shouldn’t be completely lost in the sauce, staring wild-eyed and slack-jawed at the problem with no hope of a solution.

You should feel like “damn, if I knew a little bit more this would be easy”.

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You hear this advice all the time to the point where it’s bordering on cliche.

And like all cliches and near-cliches, there’s an element of truth to it.

A lot of times the written and unwritten rules were created by dominant players who want to preserve their place at the top of the hierarchy. From the POV of an up-and-comer who’s trying to break in, these rules are invisible roadblocks standing in your way.

You have to disregard them if you want to get to where you want to be in life.

What no one tells you though is that breaking all these rules doesn’t feel good.

Why everyone follows the rules

There’s almost a moral code surrounding The Rules.

Only Bad People break The Rules. Good People are the ones who follow The Rules and find a way to succeed within the constraints everyone else operates under.

That’s what everyone thinks. Your mom thinks it. Your girlfriend thinks it. Your friends and acquaintances think it. Everyone you’ve ever met and ever will meet believes this to the core of their being.

So when you break the rules you’re going to get a lot of hate.

That’s why the words ‘scumbag’ and ‘marketer’ seem almost magnetically fused together. Any time someone says the word ‘marketer’ out loud you can almost hear the unspoken ‘scumbag’ at the front of it.

Most people have disdain for marketers, and that disdain turns into full-on contempt for the ones who openly break The Rules.

They will call you a spammer and a scammer (even though you aren’t scamming anyone, ‘scammer’ is just a catch-all for “someone I don’t like who did something I don’t like on the interwebs”). They will blame you for ruining the internet. They will accuse you of taking advantage of people. They will accuse you of being responsible for everything wrong with society.

Maybe there’s an element of truth to some of it. But any tidbits of truth that apply to a young or not-so-young internet marketer on the up-and-up also apply to the titans of commerce with their armies of lawyers and bureaucrats who follow The Rules to a T.

What benefit does a Coca-Cola commercial have on society? It annoys people, it disrupts people’s routines, it hijacks people’s attention.

But because buying advertising time is considered following The Rules it’s somehow ok.

Coca-Cola doesn’t get even 0.000001% of the hate that WiFi Money bros get.

Even though no one ever wants to see a Coca-Cola ad at any time other than the Super Bowl.

But they follow The Rules so they get a pass.

Of course, CC didn’t follow The Rules in the early days. They literally sold a product that contained cocaine as an ingredient.

And John Pemberton (founder of Coca Cola) claimed that this narcotic-infused drink would cure headaches, impotence, and morphine addiction.

This respected multinational corporation with the cute Santa and polar bear ads started out as literal drug dealers who claimed that the narcotics they sold were actually miracle cures for medical conditions.

That’s a line even I wouldn’t cross.

But now it’s all good.

Coca-Cola broke rules to get to where they are now. What makes you think that you won’t have to do the same?

And it’s not just them. You can find “scammy” origins behind almost any major company if you look hard enough.

So you know you have to do it. And you know you’re going to get a lot of hate for doing it.

What no one tells you about breaking the rules

What no one tells you is that you’re going to have to battle your own demons as well.

The whole following The Rules = being a good person mentality exists within you.

You weren’t raised by wolves. You’re a part of society and you’ve internalized society’s ideas.

So when you’re on the cusp of breaking a Rule, there will be a loud voice inside of you saying “don’t do this bro it’s wrong bro be a good person bro you don’t want to be like that bro there has to be another way bro”.

Most people hear that voice and obey it.

Only The Few can hear that voice, simply notice that it exists, and then disregard it.

If you can develop this ability the world is yours.

As far as I can tell it’s an untapped opportunity that no one else is talking about.

I kind of feel stupid for even telling you about this, but I’m in a generous mood so here you go.

You’ll want to move fast on this:

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