The Long, Lonely Road to Success
What they don't tell you about the WiFi money life
The first day you start, it seems like the entire deck is stacked against you. I’m not here to tell you what you want to hear, so I’m going to tell it to you straight: The reason why it seems like the deck is stacked against you is because it is.
When you decide to start a WiFi money business, you quickly realize that there is no shallow end of the pool. There are no bunny slopes to prevent you from falling catastrophically and there are no bumpers to prevent you from rolling your ball into the gutter.
You’re competing against the real sharks from day one.
Why even start?
Because the flip side of that equation is that, although it’s one of the hardest ways to earn a living, the barrier to entry is nonexistent. Starting up a website requires less of you than a job delivering pizzas. You don’t need anything more than a pulse and a few bucks for a domain and hosting.
For many, that is the exact reason we are doing this. Maybe you’re young and hungry and want an opportunity to prove yourself to the world without gaining approval from anyone. Or perhaps you’re a little bit older and sick of taking orders from people who are less intelligent than you.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. WiFi money is something that literally anyone can start. The only thing that determines whether you succeed or fail is your intelligence and the amount of effort you put into it.
That’s not a problem for you though, right? You’re willing to get up early and stay up late. Anything to get ahead and start living the life you dream of.
Then something happens. After a couple years you realize that everything is all wrong. You chose a niche that sucks. You’ve been writing articles without doing correct keyword research. You paid for cheap, low-quality content that will never rank. All of a sudden the thought of slinging pizzas doesn’t sound so bad. At least you get paid doing that.
At this point, most people throw in the towel.
But you’re not most people.
So you decide to start a new site or do whatever it takes to save your current one. Another year goes by and you’re now making a consistent income. All of a sudden you start watching videos from “digital nomads”. You look up the cost of rent in Thailand or Colombia. You think, “Wow. That guy is drinking margaritas on the beach and banging hot Latinas. I make the same amount of money. I could be drinking margaritas and banging ladyboys all day long too!”
This is another drop off point, where people get stuck in their digital nomad fantasy phase where they only make $5k a month while working 30 mins a day until it all falls apart.
You remind yourself that you started doing this because you wanted to really make it, not just coast through life while doing as little work as possible like a typical gridder. So you continue grinding.
Since you’re so much smarter than the digital nomad, you decide to reinvest your income. You dabble with paid advertising and blow all your cash without getting any results. Then you decide to buy links from a shady vendor to increase your organic traffic and get smacked down by a Google penalty. While you’re laying in bed at night, wide awake, freaking the fuck out about your predicament, you see faint glimmers of palm trees and ice cold drinks on the beach and you start to think that maybe the retarded digital nomad isn’t as stupid as he seems.
Instead of giving up, like a psycho, you decide to persevere. As the months and years go by, you start learning more about how the game is played. If you come across a problem, you realize that you had the same issue 2 years ago and you already know what to do. If you encounter a new situation, all of a sudden you know exactly how to find the solution. You have an intuition about how things are done and you’re always right. You’re starting to “see the matrix”.
At this point, you know more about SEO and how the internet works than 99% of human beings alive. You look at discussions on Twitter from people who work at SEO agencies and you think, “holy fuck these people are stupid. I could do their job in my sleep.”
You look up the salaries at SEO agencies. You think “wait, I can make six figures doing the most basic tasks that I already outsource because I consider them beneath my level.” At first, you laugh it off. You started this because you didn’t want to answer to anybody, not because you wanted to apply another set of golden handcuffs.
But then you take a look at your dumbass friends who are all buying Audis and going on vacation in Maui. You go to the Instagram profile of the kid who was still eating his boogers in senior year and you see that he’s living in a huge house with a hot wife and three kids. You look up from your laptop at your meager apartment with beige walls and a creaky ceiling fan that barely even moves the air. A thought crosses through your mind: “Golden handcuffs aren’t that bad. At least I’d be comfortable.”
You take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror and realize that you have to keep on going. It’s not because you want to, it’s because you have to. There is not a chance in hell that you’re going back to your cubicle just to fight with a diversity hire for the next promotion that’s not even going to open up until a decade from now.
You go back to grinding.
One day, everything starts making sense. It may have taken 5+ years, but the knowledge you’ve gained from experimenting and reading random articles/Twitter threads finally starts clicking together. You actually get it.
Now your WiFi money business feels like your own personal ATM that you can restock whenever you want. You get an idea for a new email automation flow and it prints money. A random new keyword research technique pops into your head and it yields hundreds of easy KWs. You throw up a landing page for paid ads and it converts perfectly.
You keep working and keep reinvesting money. Now you’re generating tens of thousands of dollars per month in revenue so you decide to go for the seven-figure exit. You think that you’re finally going to show up your dipshit friends who have been flexing their extravagant lifestyles in your face this whole time. When those losers see your new house and car they’ll wish that they never doubted you, right?
Except once you sell your business you discover that there are taxes, lawyer fees, and escrow fees. The house that you had bookmarked on Zillow will cause your bank account to go to zero if you buy it. And you can forget about the Porsche.
You didn’t go through this crazy-ass journey just to live a lower-middle class lifestyle. So instead of living out your revenge flex fantasy, you take all of that money and use it to start a new business.
Now that you have cash to throw into the business, you can grow faster than ever. Processes that used to take months now only take days. If you make mistakes, you have the money to fix them instantly, except now you have enough expertise that you rarely make them.
You grow your site to the seven-figure exit level in a fraction of the time it took you on the first go round. Now you have multiple seven-figure exits under your belt. You can buy the house and car you wanted without even thinking about it. You have enough money to secure you and your family’s future for multiple generations. If your friend gets cancer, you can pay for the treatment. Your mom isn’t going to be a Wal-Mart greeter or rot away in a low-quality old folks home. You’ve made it.
Now you can live however you want. You can comfortably afford the homeless-on-a-beach lifestyle that the digital nomads are only LARPing about.
This is the point where you realize that that lifestyle wouldn’t even be much fun anymore. The grind has turned you into a completely different person and you can’t relate to the fantasies or interests that normal people have. You start another business, only this time you don’t actually need it to be successful because you’ve already made it. This is a hobby for you now. This one sells for much more money and way faster than anything you’ve ever done before.
Now it’s just your life. It’s what you do. The rare times when you drink a margarita on the beach with a hot Latina by your side, you find your mind drifting back to your laptop.
This is how you have fun.
Most can’t handle it.
But if you can, you’ll live a life that few can relate to.
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Love these «life» articles.
Tetra: so you agree with btb on not quitting career until 2x income, or before? Obv not relevant for me yet, so just asking.
That's a very well written article, thank you Tetra. So much wisdom in it, inlcuding the warning about the ladyboys. And it reminded me of the "The Rise of Ngo" series from Charles Ngo.
Being in the industry for 12+ years now, I can completely relate to what you wrote. There's no "4-hour workweek", at least not in the first 5-10 years. And as BTB says, it's not getting easier when you get older. So better do the grind now.