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We’re well aware that bills need to be paid and worst case scenarios exist. Just know trading time for money is a losing proposition long-term. As soon as you can avoid it. Avoid it. Period.

Part 1: Labor is Losing Leverage

Labor Is Easiest to Control

You get a salary or hourly wage. This amount is immediately taxed. Out comes social security, medical, state tax, federal tax, and all the other nickel and dime stuff that is related to your state/zip code. There are no deductions. If you are working from home? You don’t get to deduct the implied rent. You don’t get to deduct your cell phone. You don’t get to deduct your internet. The list goes on and on and on.

Soft Lock-in: With the labor market becoming more competitive you are more locked in. This could be geography (need to be at HQ or a main city) or it could be with your pay/title. Why pay someone a significant raise if they can hire the exact same person tomorrow for the same amount +/- 5%. Better to just pay you a bit less and take the risk you can’t find another seat anyway.

Run the Quick Math Through: Mark tries to scale with a W-2. We’re aware tax rates vary by state but we’re just going to do 33% taxes at all levels to keep it simple. He does not bother with building assets. He is full on world view of the 1980s.

Now we’re going to add that rent, utilities, and other essentials ran at $50K, $70K, $90K then $100K. This means the four net income items are: $16K, $30K, $50K and $100K. If there is any confusion here just take the bullets post tax money then subtract basic expenses that ran at $50K, then $70K, then $90K then $100K.

Mark Income minus Expenses on Post Tax Basis:

• 1-3 years: $100K = $66K post tax - $50K Expense = $16K Actual

• 4-7 years: $150K = $100K post tax - $70K Expense $30K Actual

• 8-13 years: $210K = $140K post tax - $90K Expense = $50K Actual

• 14-20 years: $300K = $200K post tax - $100K Expense = $100K Actual

Joe comes into the equation. He has similar success to Mark but with a catch, it is all made from a business and he pays a flat 21% tax rate.

He has $100K, $150K, $210K, $300K but this is before he is able to make all those deductions. If it was real estate it would be depreciation expense, cost segregation etc. If it’s WiFi you’re deducting internet, computers, rent for the home office and anything else you need to run your business. We will assume he can deduct the entire thing so its easy to follow

Joe’s Calculations Are Now:

• 1-3 years: $100K - $50K = $50K pre-tax - 21% Tax = $39.5K Actual

• 4-7 years: $150K - $70K = $80K pre-tax - 21% Tax = $63.2K Actual

• 8-13 years: $210K - $90K = $120K pre-tax - 21% Tax = $94.8K Actual

• 14-20 years: $300K - $100K = $200K pre-tax - 21% Tax = $158K Actual

Look at the drastic difference in outcomes. Despite living frugally, Joe was saving more money on a net basis in just four years when compared to Mark at year 13. Absolutely absurd. If you simplistically said “$40,000 is the average difference per year” this is what it looks like compounded over 2 decades.

The difference is four fully paid off houses!!!

If this isn’t inspirational we don’t know what is. Not even Tony Robbins can save someone if they don’t find this to be adrenaline pumping excitement.

Worker Already Down $1.7M and It Gets Worse

But there is more. Joe and Mark are now uncs as the youth would call them. Instead of caring about night clubs, they care more about health clubs and golf trips. The idea of drinking until 2 am at a night club is not exciting. Going out for a steak dinner and waking up for Tee time is much better. Priorities shift.

Only one problem. Joe and Mark are not in the same position. You see, they are both suffering from high stress. One wants to retire, the other one could but doesn’t want to yet. Then an unlucky stoke of luck hits both of them: health event. They can’t perform at full capacity.

Mark: Forced to retire early. He was a golden child employee. He gets a full 1 year severance and full 1 year health coverage and all his stock vests. This nets him about 2 years of income and 1 year of health insurace.

Joe: Well, he has several options: 1) he can hire someone to run the firm at his new lower capacity and 2) he can sell. Joe has a history of friends/family dying a bit earlier than expected. Call it 70. He does the math and says he has about 25 good years left.

He decides to sell. Since the firm is running at about $300,000 in profit with consistent earnings he gets a $1.5M offer and he has to stay on for 3 years at a base salary of $75K in a reduced role. This nets out to roughly $1.7M in income for him.

Math is Math: Joe was already $1.7M ahead and now he gets another $1.7M compared to Marks $600,000. In total Joe is roughly $3,000,000 ahead when they both spend about $100,000 to survive. 30 years of life is the spread.

Limited Scale: Despite giving Mark the benefit of the doubt in (ability to move up the ranks of corporate America), he is still held down by his time commitment. Hard to book vacations. Hard to remain invisible as responsibilities ramp. Hard to envision a way out. Pot committed.

We would pour salt in the wounds and lemon juice in the eyes by pointing out a lack of control typically leads to more stress, worse personal life and worse health outcomes but we’ll go ahead and ignore that for purposes of this post. Mark is already out $3,000,000 anyway.

Labor is Becoming a Widget

Its getting harder and harder to justify higher compensation. AI is making it possible for lower IQ people to operate at the middle. The middle is operating at upper middle levels. The top is laughing since they are using AI to replace the need for the prior two segments entirely

Once you have cheap overseas labor utilizing all of these tools, software/AI is going to reduce grunt work value from $100-$200K a year down to near nothing. Probably in the $50K range at most.

Back to Joe and Mark: Despite earning about the same (not really but lets cope for a second), Joe is able to sell the asset he built. This is the crux of all the issues. When you think about it, the end all be all is control.

By having control you can: 1) decide how the expenses flow, 2) decide when you work and when you don’t, 3) decide if you want to sell the asset, keep it or bring in an operator and 4) you get to track and determine who is a widget and who is adding real value.

Control + judgement. The new name of the game.

Summary

• Selling your time means you get paid last. Government gets paid first, then living expense and you take what is left

• Asset owners get paid first. Revenue hits owner figures out what can be expensed and how the rest gets paid out. (Dividends, salaries… you get the idea it matters a lot)

• People always talk about Gross Salary when you should look at Net. If someone runs a business with $250K and another guy lives in NYC with $300K, you can easily take the $250K person and get them a high net income number ($250K just assumes pre tax income)

• There is no limit to business growth, there is a pyramid and pecking order in corporate. Unless you’ve got your degree in nepotism or blackmail, the chances are slim of bypassing the entire game

• For the example we assumed the same state for both people. You can fill in the blanks on the ability to move and its impact on cost of living + taxes

• By building assets you’re putting yourself into the drivers seat. You control where the car is going. And. At what pace. If you’re above average, this is a dream come true. If you believe in the old 40 year career path… well its “scary”

• Control + Judgement. Build these two and you will make it. Not might. Will.

Part 2: Why Assets Continue to Pull Away

Have you ever walked into an organization and said “wow everyone here is necessary and this place is operating flawlessly”. That was a joke. You can laugh now. This never happens.

The reality is that all the AI tools are simultaneously making work easier and making it easier to track who is actually producing. That last part is massive.

People who were politically loved clocking in 1/5th of the work hours? Now being highlighted in an excel sheet and sent to a higher up (politically neutral third party). Gotta produce.

Becomes More Mechanical: At this junction, everyone is looking for an excuse to cut costs. They want to lay people off? Claim its due to AI to appear forward thinking. If they do get a break through? Same result just deeper cuts.

Humans are now being turned into clean line items. Before, you’d only evaluate tools you’re paying for and if those are delivering enough value. If something costs $1,000 a year but you can justify that it makes you $2,000… it’s staying forever.

In the not too distant future. This will be every single person in an organization. Drill down the exact revenue they should be credited, the exact expense and see what the operating profit/margin spits out. Simple as that. If you’re red? You’re gone. If you’re below corporate? Gone sooner than later. If above? You’re going to be left alone. Unbothered. Which is actually the real sign of respect in corporate.

The Asset Earns More While Doing Less: You can see the spiral. If labor has a lot of competition and owners can easily see where to trim? It’s vicious.

Company sees less job openings → they don’t raise incomes/don’t promote as much → new tools allow them to reduce costs → more job applications come in suggesting huge tilt to business owner → repeat the same process again…

This only breaks when the firm gets too greedy and starts cutting people they shouldn’t. It will happen. They will assume a few key people are not valuable. They get cut. Suddenly need them back and now you have an even more expensive problem (have to pay up to get then back).

The reason you’re not seeing that right now? All the pain is located at the entry level. If that is the case, the chances of firing a key employee is near nothing. If you needed an extra admin in a few years, you won’t be paying top dollar. Fire the wrong 1,000x engineer/sales person? Yeah. You’re in for a world of hurt.

Typical Wage-Price Spiral

The difference? In 2026 the owners/asset creators can use AI/software to drive down the wages part. They will keep prices flat and drop the wages. This is a great strategy as the consumer will realize they are not paying more. Consumer sticks around for a longer period of time and the competition that gets greedy (raising price + dropping wages) will lose market share.

Summary

AI/Software is handing control and margins to the business owner. A worker is actually forced to learn the tasks to perform better for the company. Think about how absurd that is. No different from the original proliferation of the computer and internet. Suddenly performance expectation went vertical and there was no looking back. This is the same.

Any asset with scale already (could be as boring as Johnson and Johnson) will benefit by getting rid of their entire back-end with a few engineers + cheap subscriptions.

You want to be the one owning more stock or the one making the stock go up with no exposure? Seems like an easy choice but you’d be surprised.

Part 3: Back to Mark and Joe

While it is painfully obvious that Joe is the winner. Not just financially but in terms of quality of life and freedom, the question is “why don’t others do it”

From our experience its really a three things:

1. They are risk averse. The comment of “don’t know where to start” has been answered well over 100 times on the paid stack along with step by steps on how to find product gaps. For some reason they are more scared of losing $200 on a failed LLC vs. the $200,000 spent on some random college degree

2. They are older. The older someone is the more likely they are to talk a big game. They will cope and say it isn’t possible or that the numbers are too small initially. Yes $1,000 a month is nothing if you’re in a $500,000/year seat. Think back to when you were 21 though. Would $1,000 be useful? Yep. “Bigly”

3. Living in the past. People love to do this. Its so common that its basically the backbone of politics. Going “back to the 90s, 80s” when things were “better”. Per usual. It wasn’t better at all. Talent goes to the top and always will

The problem now? Don’t really have a choice. If you’re 20, 30 or even 40, you need to start building up some sort of asset. While E-com/Wifi is what we do/recommend, we’re not against your dreams of building houses or brick and mortar (assuming it is extremely well vetted and you’re convinced it’ll work).

That’s really the message. Before we would write these posts and show the math. People would cope and seethe and move on. Pay their BMW lease and mortgage. Drink. Call it a bad dream.

Today? No longer a dream. Reality. Sink or swim.

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

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It’s Easter…

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Is Any of This Actually New?

Not really. Socially it is just getting more extreme. That’s the real difference. Information has been disseminated broadly. Guys don’t view women as harmless princesses. Women have become more comfortable being socially competitive/vicious. Just how it goes.

If you’re a young guy (18-25) or so, there is no reason to ever spend real money chasing women. At this age band the vast majority just care about "having a good time”. A good tell is following some major youtube accounts like Content Machine which have humorous videos on how this happens over the years.

Source

If you go through that quick short it basically goes: 20 needs to be everything, 25 money becomes more important, 30 standard drop big and more emphasis on being stable, then 35-45 escalation to more desperation.

As usual “not all people are like that”. There are people who are compatible with various looks, income and personality traits. The “love is love” standard deviation from norm, doesn’t disprove the trend.

In fact, if you go back 5, 10 and 15 years ago all of these age band discussions are about the same. Just with various twists on how they meet/interact. Netflix and chill, white collar worker + pool boy trolling, so on and so forth.

Same Trend Just More Competitive

The one thing that has changed is the competition. Due to social media/internet proliferation, the vast majority of people have had the chance to go way above their “looks match” or “sexual market value” as they said back in the 2010s.

18-23: If you’re a young guy and spending anything more than a few drinks and cheap dates, you’re wasting your time. This is pure Disney mode. Everyone thinks their guy is going to turn it around and somehow be a multi-millionaire by his mid 30s. In reality this is statistically impossible and the top 1% is always going be 1/100. Top 1% can refer to looks, money, status etc. Doesn’t matter.

24-28: Typically where most people end up finding a mate. The women have wisened up seeing that a large chunk do not make it. No need to waste time “investing” in someone since their ideal person is already stable enough to think about kids/family/house etc.

29-33: Standard drop big and it becomes a strange range where you see a lot of *women* settle for guys they usually wouldn’t even give a chance. Also explains why this age gets real dangerous. Enough experience to manipulate a guy to do what they want and eventually they get tired of him because he wasn’t their “first choice anyway”

We’re not going to go through the older ranges as there is too much volatility. Lots of guys check out, lots of women check out, lots of divorced/already had kids people in the mix once you’re out past this rough band.

What This Means for the US

Once you see that and you combine it with a K-shape economy, it becomes clear. Some women will end up making tons. Starting a business, using AI to scale something digital/SaaS, big dispersion in outcomes. Even in wealthy areas like Beverly Hills it is quite common for the kids to be a small fraction of the success relative to their parents. If they grew up in some $4-6M place, the kids end up in a townhome or something like that by the time they are in their 30s or so.

Hagmaxxing - Guys Quit

This is going to get much worse. People who graduated somewhere in the 2000s see the writing on the wall. Their idealized version of where they would be does not match up with where they are. This might be due to decision making, bad luck, so on and so forth. The reason is less important than the psychological impact

Also at this age (35-45 or so) most guys just lose interest in the constant going out, same script and living a low quality life. You can usually tell who is going down this route as they begin finding humor on the comment “Marry first for money, you can marry for love later”. Said differently, if things didn’t work out, around age 40 guys end up thinking like women around age 30 (not perfect but rough math).

Most likely you’ll see this in the more vain cities in the USA first. That means Miami, Los Angeles etc. Places with an emphasis on consumerism will see a big increase in guys dating older women. You’ll see it in small increments (2-3 year age gap) and it’ll eventually get up into the 5-10 year band. We wouldn’t be surprised to see 50 year old women with men age 42-44 or so.

Again. Doesn’t really matter how the woman got her money. Could be family money, could be from her own extreme success. Just doesn’t matter. The trend is the trend.

Impact on Consumer Goods: This means luxury goods are not going to slow down any time soon. While the packaging may change (watches, shoes, cars etc.) the direction is the same. Just as a young woman wouldn’t date an older broke guy (9/10 times) a guy dating an older woman doesn’t want to take the ego hit and eat at the Olive Garden (unless he’s down huge).

What is really interesting here is that it’ll make the K-shape recovery even more in your face. We’ve reached a tipping point where the wealthy areas of the USA see no economic impact. Gas could go to $10 and no one will operate any differently. If you’ve got $10,000,000+ you’re not even tracking your gas fill up that’s for sure. In fact, it’ll make the trend accelerate as they’ll notice the price changes on a subconscious level and realize they have economic leverage.

Men Become More Appearance Focused for Longer

Usually obsession with looks peaks out around 25 years old or so for men. They go through the big gym and fitness obsession. Tracking macros, working out, getting their clothing right and traveling to see the world.

The difference is that this is going to extend and explains why adolescence seems to be common even in middle age “40 is the new 30” or whatever slogan they are using to justify their partying.

Good Angles: Women have gone through botox and fillers. Men are going to go down the same general slope as well. While they unlikely go through the extreme levels of plastic surgery that women go through, we did not expect bone smashing (breaking your face with a hammer) to come this quickly. Wasn’t on the bingo card that’s for sure.

Instead you can expect to see growth in med spa products tailored to men as well. This is all a symptom of the root cause: 1) lower quality of life/economic opportunity outside the top 1% and 2) loneliness as people lose the ability to keep the candle burning on both ends by around mid/late 30s or so.

Beyond MedSpas, you’d be a fool to fade anti-aging longevity type businesses as well. That’s probably the biggest growth segment because men will need a spin on it. Peptides, hormone replacement etc. It’s already useful for people and it can be spun into a looksmaxxing angle that is good for you as well.

Aging naturally doesn’t make sense. And. All of this will accelerate the below

Expected Outcome: More growth in all kinds of health related optimization. People are going far beyond a few botox injections. Moving into height increasing surgery, peptides, TRT, HRT and full on cosmetic surgery such as the newly popularized jaw line changes. These procedures cost tens of thousands of dollars.

If you’re thinking about doing anything medical related with your life, this is where we would go (as usual not financial/medical advice).

We didn’t even touch on hair transplant/hair system type products. Those will be printing as well.

Source

As a bonus, this will likely impact people’s feet/lower legs over time. Don’t think it’ll make sense to see a guy who is 6’ 3” with a size 8-9 shoe. Can’t be good on the body and likely shortens lifespan quite a bit as the heart as to work in overdrive to reach the much further extremities of the body (feet/toes)

Going Mainstream

Our working assumption is that this will all go mainstream. In fact we might be there already. It means that signs of wealth will include: 1) full head of hair, 2) HGH glow from improved skin, 3) being 6’ tall or more - whatever reason this is the obsessed cut off on the internet and 4) prominent jawlines.

Once it goes mainstream, this will be an expectation for people in general. We’ve already seen a big movement related to JD Vance. He needs to be “more attractive” to win the future. There is certainly some truth to this now. Back when the TV came out, it actually caused a big shift in the type of politicians that would get the green light to run for the presidency.

Summary

Looksmaxxing crowd is 100% correct in their current youth/dating/culture assessment. The suggestion that it is new? Not so much. Has just gotten more extreme due to massive spam related to social media. Men and women now have visual access to what the truly wealthy can and will do.

You’ll see all of these trends pick up, lots of money will be made and it’ll be up to you to adapt or not!

Oh and if you’re wondering. Yes this post is still relevant.

Have your fun in the states just don’t mess it up. The answer was solved back in the mid 2010s. Just now mainstream accounts are talking about dead cities like Medellin and Krakow. Up to you to figure it out.

Can’t do it for you can just give you the outline!

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Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

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White collar workers represent the main artery for consumption. Without high paying W-2 white collar work, there is no real demand for variable discretionary spending. Landscaping, cleaning, car washes, vacations and any other “nice to have” gets thrown into the garbage bin.

We’re going to make sense of the “vibe” as Gen Z would call it. White collar sees it first which is why the current economy is polarizing.

Feels Confusing Because It is

Most people view downturns as “everything is down”. This really isn’t the case right now. If you’re a business owner taking advantage of AI, you’re making more than you could have possibly dreamed. You’re also pretending to be struggling while heading out to nice restaurants on Tuesdays.

The American economy has felt confusing depending on where the person sits. If your goal is to climb **up** the corporate ladder, it doesn’t feel great that is for sure.

This stagnation allows for the headlines to say “resilient labor market”, “low unemployment”, and “improved producitivty/efficiency”.

Then white collar workers star to piece it together:

• Recruiters are not calling as much

• If you were making $500,000 and get laid off, taking a new role that pays $300,000 to stay afloat you’re “employed” despite a -40% drop to income

• Job postings are getting 2x, 3x or 4x the number of applicants

• Interview processes get longer and those merit increases are mirroring Fed printed inflation numbers

• What was previously an upward trajectory now feels like a flat/frozen organization

• That is the story today

White Collar Feels the Change First

If you’re seeing less openings, slower hiring, increased competition and flat pay vs. inflation… this means the asset owners hold all the leverage again. (IE. the Boss/CEO). If a CEO gets 4x the number of applicants? No need to pay up. Easy to replace and no chance the white collar slaves move.

This is why people feel they are behind. One side is getting richer by the second via cost cutting initiatives. The other is clocking in and out (thankful to have a W-2) and doesn’t see line of sight to making it.

Historically, both of these vibes can coexist for a period of time. In fact, we’ve probably been in that pattern for about 4-6 months already. Hiring slows. Openings decline. Fear spreads. Profits for Companies go up - for now. Layoffs pick up. Companies fire too many people. Suddenly need to bring back in talented niche people.

Based on the typical trajectory, we’re somewhere between fear + profits. Still some time to wait.

In short, if you’re feeling the softness it’s because you’re closer to the beginning of the chain of events. Or. You are profiting off the softness by being a business owner using new tech.

Source

Gallup reported that ~27% of college grads said it was a good time to find a quality job (March 2026). This is the lowest reading in over a decade. Hiring is also down about 20-30% depending on the industry. All of this lines up with tech innovation since technology is designed to remove human labor. The easier the task (see entry level), the more likely it is replaced by code.

Abundant white collar opportunities? That is not the case in 2026. Likely over until new roles are created. Anyone with advanced knowledge of AI/software tools will be making more money though!

Now board rooms are asking a different question: How many people do we actually need?

That is the new game. A CFO simply goes through all these line items in excel and sees what type of margins they produce. If it isn’t in the green, he tries to replace the bulk of their work with code, give it to his manager and bump up his pay 5-10% to justify the additional work. Essentially making one guy do 3-4 roles and pay him like he does 1.5. Big margins. Big profits.

We’re not going to bother calculating the exact job loss. Our assumption is that it is impossible to figure out. Every company will justify all layoffs as “AI” even if they were planning on cutting in the first place. The real answer? Once 2026 is done and firms have “right sized” we’ll know the real number that AI took. If they are scrambling to rehire important people, you know that the hopes of AI got a bit out of hand in certain sectors.

Can You Really Blame the CEOs? When Block announced a significant headcount reduction, the stock rallied 20%+ and is the only reason it is holding up ytd vs. the vast majority of high beta tech stocks.

New Framework: Layoffs = sign of strength. Sounds funny until it clicks. If your tech is actually advanced and you don’t need 10,000 people (can get same results or better with 8,000) then the layoff is an announcement that you’re *ahead*. This goes directly against the industrial age motto.

You can see this with Microsoft, Amazon and Meta all coming through with their own downsizing/AI related work force reduction.

In addition to that, the vast majority of tech companies likely overspent on all their data centers. They can help justify this by cutting costs and increasing margins to appease investors.

White collar cuts are much harder to see visibly. When 2,000 people show up to a building and suddenly it is 1,800 do you even notice? No not really. It’s not like construction work where you’d see a sudden drop in buildings.

The second problem? No one really knows the real reason for their layoff right now. We won’t see who has advanced AI until at least 2027/2028. No CEO or manager would ever tell someone “we’re losing market share”. It is always “amazing time to join the company” and “we’re really sad we have to do this but the guy above me is saying resources are being moved to department 2 for more revenue and margin opportunities”

As You Can See: Many got the Memo

January JOLTS has openings at 6.9 million and hires at 5.3 million. While it looks fine, the trajectory has been down for about 2-3 years straight. This doesn’t look like consistent expansion. Looks more like a loss of momentum.

Onto the Rest of The Economy

White collar is in the midst of the storm right now. The next move is a decline in discretionary spending. 1) slower to upgrade the home, 2) delay moving, 3) no new car, 4) cut vacations, 5) decline in hired help, 6) more cash vs purchasing assets and 7) directionally going from offense to defense

Around now is essentially the second order effects. Even if someone survived the round of cuts at META/Block/AMZN they are going to spend a bit less since they are worried about the future. They are part of a leaner team and that means the slack at the bottom no longer exists.

Note: Pro-tip for OGs, never say anything bad about anyone you work with. Especially if they are not good. The longer they are there, the more job security you actually have! Most don’t have the ability to conceptualize second order thinking. Besides, nothing to gain from bashing on anyone at work. None of them are your friends anyway

Once services demand declines, bargaining power shifts away from services to customers again.

Think About Negotiating Leverage

Ask who has the power in the situation.

• If jobs are hard to get? Owner/operator has more leverage

• Can replace more people with code? The platform has the leverage

• If things are becoming commoditized? Distribution has more leverage

• If money is scarce and hard to come by? Capital allocator has more leverage

• If people are willing to do anything to “get by”? Customer has leverage and middle gets squeezed

That is why this K-shape economy feels like it is never ending. We exited a $10,000,000,000,000 money printing economy to inflate assets then entered into an AI economy where white collar jobs are getting slashed/made redundant.

Conceptually, once the average professional has his value flatten out, more leverage moves to operators/owners. Hint hint, you should become an expert on these AI tools to build your own small system and become indispensable to your firm. That simple step is enough to create a gap between you and NPCs

All Comes Back to Emotions: You’re getting a live crash course in emotions. Everything written here will strike a nerve with NPCs. They know it is true. However. They will do absolutely nothing about it!

They can see and feel the ground shifting a bit. Degrees, working hard and doing what you’re told is simply not enough. The problem? They just stop there and avoid improving their skill set. Do you really think a 50 year old who doesn’t even know how to use excel anymore is going to keep up with Claude/AI? Yeah. Exactly.

While others panic, you improve your position.

Boil it Down

Now that you have your list of who has leverage, now you can move to asking a simple question. “What does this create long-term”. If your goal is to make big strides over the next 5-10 years related to wealth, you have to remove all activities that will decline in value.

Here is a simple yes ladder. Does This:

• Increase long-term equity

• Improve sales/marketing skills

• Improve skills related to leading edge tech

• Increase visibility

• Create a cash flow for you that occurs while you sleep

If it is a yes to any of those? Continue. If it is a no to all of them. Best to move on.

You know where the dividing line is going to be. Copy pasting numbers from a computer to another spreadsheet isn’t a useful skill. Learn things that the older generation won’t process as fast and where demand will be highest. Most are doing the opposite, holding onto tasks they know are going to be automated away.

Summary on Where This is Going

We really don’t care about an “official” recession. Or an “official downturn based on X% decline”. The writing is already on the wall. The government could always just spend another 100 billion to make the GDP number go up anyway.

We know that the hiring market has weakened, more demand for jobs vs. supply and management is being told to focus more on operating margins.

Look at that set up and the answer is clear. Position yourself as the guy who can make the margins go up and consistently find ways to expand margins. The guy who can find holes in the market to protect/gain market share. And. Direct proof of revenue growth/cost reduction. If you’re doing anything close to what is written here, you’re mils ahead in corporate. You’re a billion miles ahead if you have $1,000 of WiFi profits coming in on a monthly basis.

The most efficient and profitable will survive.

Once all these initiatives are rolled out, the behavior of people will change for good. We already saw this post COVID. After behaviors change, it is tough to get them to revert back assuming it was faster, cheaper and more secure.

On that note we hope you have a plan. We’re constantly updating everyone on the market + opportunities that will inevitably come of all this.

Please don’t be the middle aged guy saying “back in my day” or “if only we could return to the past”. Just an admission of not making it in life. No one successful today wants to go back to the eating glass years!

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

In general, people only make big purchases when 1) they are forced to through life events or 2) when they feel confident in their own futures. As you can imagine, the second portion is unlikely for anyone in a standard W-2/White Collar position.

Also as you’ll read later in this post, we’re working on an all encompassing RE post as well (that you can do yourself in the future if you wish - during boring times like this)!

Read more

You can access Summ HERE and get 25% off your first year for being a BTB subscriber. Yes this also operates as a ref link. (code: BTB25)

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Welcome Avatar!

We’ve entered a new era of taxation. Tax year 2025 is the first year that centralized exchanges like Coinbase will be sending a Form 1099-DA reporting on your trading activity. Maybe you received one already, maybe you haven’t. One thing’s for sure: if you sold or traded on any major broker in 2025, you’ll receive a 1099-DA in 2026 for the first time ever.

You may be thinking: Oh great! This is going to make filing taxes a lot easier since I can just submit the info on my 1099-DA to the IRS. Sorry to burst your tax bubble, but that’s not the case. This year’s 1099-DAs are a mess because the IRS allowed brokers to report sale proceeds without a cost basis. That means you could be on the hook for huge tax expenses that you may not technically owe because your cost basis wasn’t appropriately accounted for – either it was missing, listed as zero, or completely wrong.

Since the IRS only has partial visibility into your taxable activities, relying solely on 1099-DAs is not the way to file your taxes. And being able to prove what your cost basis was is more important than ever before.

With that in mind, here’s a rundown of what you should know.

As usual none of this is legal or financial advice. Every situation is different, and you should seek your own professional advice. This is meant to give you an idea of what’s changing and how you might fit it into your own strategy.

So, what is a 1099DA?

Form 1099-DA is essentially a form for brokers (such as Coinbase or Kraken) to file that summarizes the digital asset trading activity you’ve made on their platform. Think of it like the crypto version of Form 1099-B, which reports proceeds made from stocks, bonds, and other securities. Form 1099-DA reports:

Gross proceeds: The total value received in USD from every time you’ve sold or traded crypto

Information on the digital asset: Token ID, asset name, and the number of units for each asset

Transaction details: Transaction type (whether it was bought, sold, or traded) and the date it was acquired and sold or disposed of.

But what if I’ve conducted thousands of transactions on Coinbase, will they send me stacks and stacks of 1099-DAs? It’s unlikely. Chances are they’re going to issue a single consolidated 1099 statement per account. This may include a 1099-DA for your crypto sales and trades, and separate forms like 1099-MISC for staking income or 1099-INT for interest (if applicable).

Keep in mind, at the moment you’ll likely only receive 1099-DAs from centralized exchanges. So if most of your activity is on Uniswap, don’t spend your days refreshing your email, waiting for your 1099-DA to arrive. It won’t (not anytime soon, anyway).

You got a 1099-DA. What do you do?

If you’ve received a 1099-DA, you’re either unfazed or confused. Maybe you’re used to getting a 1099-B from Robinhood, or any other stock broker, and it’s no big deal. But if you’re in Camp B, and wondering what the heck you’re meant to do with this thing, this part’s for you.

First things first: Don’t panic. You haven’t done anything wrong. This is just a record of your trading activity on one platform.

Next, review your summary. On your 1099-DA, you’re going to see a lot of info. The most important stuff to look out for is a description of the asset that you sold, along with the date and time that you got rid of it, and your proceeds (how much you got for selling it).

Don’t worry if you see a lot of empty fields. Not everything is going to be filled out since for the 2025 tax year, brokers only have to report your proceeds. Which is why your cost basis may be missing (depending on the individual broker and how they choose to report). This is going to change for the 2026 tax year, as all exchanges will be required to report both your proceeds and cost basis, but only for “covered assets.”

What’s a covered asset?

That’s fancy lingo for any asset you buy from a centralized exchange after January 1st, 2026. So, if you went wild and decided to jump into buying crypto as your 2026 new years resolution, you bet you’re going to receive a 1099-DA for all those new assets you bought, along with proceeds and cost basis.

Now what?

If you think getting a 1099-DA from an exchange means all your crypto tax work is done and dusted, think again.

A 1099-DA only reports your activity for the exchange that’s sent it. If you filed your taxes based on just one 1099-DA you got, your number would not only be incomplete, they’d also likely be wrong.

Since exchanges don’t communicate with each other or see general on-chain activity, you still have to do the digging and round up every single different transaction from the various exchanges you use. You can pull this data right from the platforms you use, either by:

Getting the records manually

If you don’t have many transactions, you can export CSV files from all the exchanges you’ve used. Depending on the individual broker, you can often find CSV files in the Tax tab (this is where it sits within Coinbase). You then select the trading period and click generate and download report.

Using a crypto tax platform to import your data automatically

Use a crypto platform like Summ to connect with all your wallets and exchanges and import your complete transaction history.

Users can also verify the accuracy of their tax reports by importing their 1099-DA directly into Summ.

Okay, I have all my transactions. What’s next?

Once you’ve recorded all your transactions, you’ll be able to track your cost basis from any assets you’ve transferred. Using your cost basis for each of your transactions, you’ll be able to figure out your gains and losses.

Finally, you report your gains and losses from each crypto transaction on Form 8949. This works together with Schedule D to provide an overall summary of all your capital gains and losses (including crypto).

EXAMPLE: In 2025, Sam made one transaction on Kraken. He sold one ETH worth $3,200. At the end of January 2026, Sam received a 1099-DA from Kraken reporting the one ETH he sold in 2025. The cost basis was blank, and the proceeds were reported as $3,200.

Since Sam only pays taxes on his capital gains or losses, he’ll need to pull up the numbers on how much he bought and sold the ETH for to figure out his gain/loss. Here’s the formula he’ll use for capital gains/losses:

Proceeds (How much he sold the asset for) – Cost Basis (how much he bought the asset for)

Sam only had one transaction in 2025, so he only needs to report his capital gain or loss for the ETH. However, if he had multiple transactions, he’d need to report his capital gain or loss for each of the transactions he made on Form 8949, then fill in his overall capital gain or loss on Schedule D (including all other non-crypto trades and investments).

The cost basis strategy

*Remember* determining your cost basis isn’t just a matter of bookkeeping, it’s a tax strategy. Whether you are figuring out your cost basis manually or using a crypto tax platform, the accounting method you choose to use can impact your final tax bill:

FIFO (First In First Out): You sell your oldest assets first. This can reduce your cost basis in a bull market, meaning higher gains and overall tax owed. Keep in mind FIFO doesn’t avoid short-term capital gains.

HIFO (Highest In, First Out): You sell the assets with the highest cost basis first. This can result in the highest amount of losses, lowering your capital gains and potentially reducing your tax bill. Keep in mind HIFO also doesn’t avoid short-term capital gains.

LIFO (Last In, First Out): You sell the assets you acquired most recently first. When prices are rising, this could create the highest cost basis and potentially smaller capital gains from disposals.

Which accounting method should you pick? There’s not one right answer, although many choose FIFO because it’s what the IRS automatically applies when no selection has been made, and may reduce long-term capital gains. Meanwhile, others use HIFO since it can consistently reduce your capital gains. But it really depends on what you’re trying to achieve and the existing market conditions, for e.g., if prices are increasing and are expected to continue.

Why a lot of 1099-DAs are wrong (Yep, really)

Exchanges are only able to report the activity that they see on their platform. They can’t see your full crypto history, and they don’t want that responsibility, either.

Once crypto is sent to another exchange, wallet, or DeFi, the initial broker wipes their hands clean of it. This most likely means you’re not getting an accurate picture of your tax liabilities or your overall gain or loss – you have to figure that part out on your own.

While a 1099-DA will report any disposals that occurred on a broker’s platform (such as sales or trading one crypto for another), you won’t find the following on your 1099-DA:

Cost basis (for 2025 tax year). This is vital for reporting your gains and losses

Staking rewards

DeFi transactions

Wrapped tokens

Airdrop income

Mining income

To properly report your taxable gains and losses to the IRS, you need the whole story, not just bits and pieces. If you don’t track your own cost basis you could end up paying taxes on your full proceeds and overpay by many thousands of dollars. Summ will figure out your overall capital gains and losses *and* cost basis automatically.

Remember, you don’t owe taxes on your gross proceeds. You owe taxes on how much money you actually make (your capital gain or loss).

Risks with 1099-DAs

With the onset of 1099-DAs being sent, here’s what’s at risk:

Inaccurate cost basis

This is one of the biggest issues with the first round of 1099-DAs. An exchange can’t accurately calculate the cost basis without having access to your full transaction history. So if you’ve transferred assets from another wallet or decentralized platform, the broker issuing the 1099-DA won’t actually be able to access what you originally paid.

The result? Most exchanges are either going to be leaving cost basis blank (for 2025 tax year), or assuming the cost basis for incoming crypto is market price, so relying solely on 1099-DAs for tax reporting will make it seem like you owe way more taxes than you actually do.

Mismatching

Mismatching between your own data and what’s reported on a 1099-DA can – and will – happen. Exchanges and crypto software use a range of pricing sources and data to determine what a coin was worth when it was acquired. This means that you’ll see differences in the proceeds reported on your 1099-DA and Form 8949.

You can either match the information the IRS has from Form 1099-DA (which may mean paying slightly more taxes), or rely on your own records and report the exact proceed amount. Just be sure to have receipts in case the IRS comes knocking.

Paying extra taxes

Thanks to misinterpreted transactions, inaccurate cost basis, and ignored prior history, you’ll have to be extra vigilant about tracking your crypto transactions yourself, or you’ll pay a whole lot of extra taxes. And no one wants that.

Why Keeping Your Records Matters

In true stalker fashion, the IRS is comparing what you’re reporting on your tax return with the 1099-DAs they’ve been sent. That means any type of discrepancy will be noticed, and you’ll get a fun little message about it to fix things ASAP…or else.

EXAMPLE: Let’s say you sold 1 BTC on Coinbase in May 2025 for $105k.

Coinbase sends a 1099-DA, reporting this to both you and the IRS. If you don’t report this sale, or report it for any amount other than $105k, the IRS will get automatically flagged and you’ll receive a stern warning to fix it. Or plead your case to justify the difference.

Here’s where it gets tricky. This is a clean example, however, not all transactions are. The issue here is that 1099-DAs report proceeds, not profit. So the IRS sees a $105k sale, but they don’t see what price you bought the BTC for, where you bought it from, if you transferred it from another wallet, or how you determined your cost basis. That’s all on you to figure out.

This is where most people get caught out. You’re responsible for:

Cross-checking your 1099’s against your transactions to make sure the numbers add up

Keeping records of all your transactions across wallets and exchanges to determine your cost basis

Making sure you’re reporting your capital gains and losses, not just proceeds

If you don’t keep clear records you not only risk overpaying on taxes, you also won’t have any proof to show the IRS if your numbers don’t match theirs.

Navigating the Shift

The 2025 tax year is just the warm-up for 1099-DAs. Starting in 2026 brokers will be required to report both proceeds and cost basis. But this isn’t going to solve the contextual gaps.

At low volume, you should be able to manage manual tracking and filling in the gaps. But if you’ve got multiple wallets, cross-chain activity, and never-ending transactions, doing your taxes manually may make you want to gouge out your eyes (please don’t).

If you want to avoid the actual pain of doing the manual work, try using a crypto tax platform that aggregates all your wallets and exchanges, can fill in cost basis gaps, and explain mismatches.

Summ taps into all your exchanges and wallets so reporting actually reflects the full picture. Not only does it help reduce the risk of making the IRS mad, it can help save you all the extra dollars you may have spent overpaying taxes if you tried to figure things out manually.

All you need to do is sync your wallets and exchanges with Summ and the platform will reconcile all your transactions to ensure nothing is missing. That means producing reports that can reduce the chance of mismatching, avoid overpaying tax or inventing cost basis, and if mismatches do come up, explain why the differences occurred.

Then you can send the reports to your preferred tax filing platform or your accountant and your job’s done.

Sort out your crypto taxes with Summ. Get 25% off your first year using code BTB25.

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Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

Read more

Part 1: What is Sequence of Returns

Simple Explainer: Sequence of Returns represents the risk that you stop working and suddenly there is a big drawdown. As you can see from the above image from Schwab, it can significantly impact your future, looking at years of pain. This is because a 15% decline would take a 17.65% return just to get back to break even. The problem with living off portfolio returns alone is that you are still selling to cover living costs.

Concept for W-2s as Well: Outside of starting your own biz, if you’re going to keep a career for the long-term you want the math to work where you retire/get let go during the first round of cuts (in a bear). This is because most high-end white collar work will pay you out around a year of income if you had long tenure and played the politics game well.

Mathematically, a single year of income is probably more than 2 years of income. You’d see a drop in living costs, market is down but you don’t even need to touch the portfolio.

Big Picture, no matter who you are you want the numbers to math out when markets are in a down year, not a big up year. Most do the opposite and psychologically anchor to their peak net worth, end up taking more risk. And. Blow up!

Markets Are Not Linear

Source

Since birth you were trained to think linearly. 4 years high school, 4 years college, 3 years investment banking analyst, 3-4 years associate, 3 years VP…. so on and so forth. This isn’t how the real world works and isn’t how markets work either. From the above you can see there are always big down years over a decade.

You don’t need to anchor to “quit in a -30%” however, quitting in a minus -10-15% is much safer.

People in this situation: 1) they didn’t fail to invest, 2) they didn’t invest in vapor, 3) they didn’t take massive risk. They didn’t think of sequence of returns. Average returns are largely a meme because your time horizon is no longer “60+ years” it is shorter “a couple of decades”.

Another way to think about it. If you’re grinding through the down years, you’re buying tons of shares that lower your cost basis. The years markets are up big? You’re actually raising them. Structural problem.

Would you rather die rich to create trust fund babies or worry about last second medical bills?

Time Based Thinking

Beyond the emotional structure of investing (the most important), learning to think in terms of time frames is much more valuable. Looking at averages is lazy. If you see multiple -10%, -20% or even -30% when looking across decades, that means there are +20%, +30% years as well (to get the average 7-8%).

“If I pull 4% per year, I’m fine.” This only works if you’re exiting at the middle, not at the top or bottom.

Quick Example

• Someone ends up with $4,000,000 and plans to pull $160,000/year

• On paper, looks reasonable. Now the market drops 25% in the first two years. A million has vanished when they ***should*** to be up “$320,000”.

• They must sell to cover costs and they are gone forever

• If markets recover the next year at +20%, it doesn’t matter. The units are gone

• Now your baseline 4% goal of $160,000 is gone likely a minimum double digit decline

When you’re living on earned income “stable” paychecks, the crashes are a gift. Exact opposite happens once you go solo. Mike Tyson punch of declining asset values and selling pressure.

The wild part in all this, is you don’t need to plan that far ahead. Just look at asset prices and ask if it has been up for about 5 years. If that’s the case and we didn’t just get out of a downturn, you’re better off playing the time game and manufacturing that 1-2 year of additional buffer.

Create Economic Flexibility

Want a yacht? A Super Car? Cool, best to just rent.

The math will help you a lot. If you plan on going a stretch of time (retirement, sold a company etc.) without earning a lot, you want more variable expenses than fixed overhead. Skip the vacation home and you don’t have a recurring tax, insurance, maintenance, utilities overhead. You probably want flexibility in where you go anyway.

• Boats, vacation homes, luxury cars = Rent

• Buy = primary forever home, reliable car

• Spend out of bond/utilties/boring stock portfolio - adds even less pain in down years as they are down less

• Flexible spend comes out of stocks, crypto and rental income from properties (rentals mainly due to tax benefits)

Behavior matters. Allocation matters. Time frame matters. If assets have ripped matters. Overhead matters. The rest is actually much easier to ignore vs. the boring “i’m good at X% withdrawal rate”.

Think About Changing the System

When you’re in growth mode you don’t care much about downturns. No one building a company, jumping up the corporate ladder or living life on full blast has any interest in prices today. The old system was “maximize long-term returns” in the new system you’re looking at “probabilities of survival”. How many ugly years can you survive vs. how many decades of compounding do you have.

Structure It As Follows:

• If you took a random dead beat job, how much of the “safe” withdrawal can you offset. You already have the numbers, if you could survive about 20% of the stated withdrawal that’s healthy

• How many uncorrelated income streams do you have built in: real estate, stocks, tech stocks, crypto, bonds and anything else you own that isn’t in those five main buckets

• How much is variable spending baked into your costs? Higher is better. If half your costs are actually variable and unnecessary, you’re 2x as safe as you think

Instead of worrying about average/median returns, think more about time based returns. It’ll serve you well considering economic cycles are 7-10 years in length.

Part 2: Now Onto Application of This At Any Age

We’re guessing a large chunk of you are saying “doesn’t matter i’m not retiring soon” or “I haven’t sold a company yet”. While that might be true, you can figure out a way to manage your own cash position intelligently.

Each Year Increase Percent to Cash: This served us well back in the 2010s. If you’re in a bull market and know it, what you can do is slowly increase the cash position. We’re not saying that you go all out or all in every 7 years.

Instead you can create a smoother return line.

If a bull market started this year (it isn’t) but if it did, think about it like this.

• Year 1 you’re putting $5K a year into cash

• Year 2 you’re putting $10K into cash

• Year 3 you’re putting $17K into cash

• Year 4 you’re putting $25K into cash

• Year 5 you’re putting $35K into cash

• Year 6 you’re putting $45K into cash

• Year 7 you’re putting $50K into cash

• Flat-line here and wait for bear

If you do that, then you simply set yourself up to actually buy the dip. Since we know that every single up year = chances of buying the top, that means you’re changing your cost basis slightly. Then you see a -10-20% year and you have a double win: 1) you can lump sum buy more than you were in years 4-5 and 2) you have an amount you were already buying every month anyway.

Congrats. Simple solution to hit singles and doubles without a complicated sequence of return risk in your net worth.

If the market hits 100 (just a number) and you see -20%, that means you’re getting significantly more shares. Likely more than you were getting in year 4. Roughly speaking, you’ve purchased shares in the past (that’s the concept)

Each Year Test More in Downturns: On the income side of the equation, you should actually test more of your ideas in a weaker economy

Several reasons for this: 1) ad costs likely lower, 2) people quit opening up more market share and 3) if you’re making your first $100K a year in a downturn, what happens when things go up again and you’re the new shiny product? You guessed it, likely making $200K off your idea

Most don’t do this. They think it’s a good idea to start something when things are hot. Makes little sense. When things are hot consumers do no look for new alternatives/products. They stick to whatever they were doing since it “doesn’t matter”.

Downturn = market share shift. If you have a product that fills a gap in the market, you’ll make multiples when it turns.

Anchor to Percentages and Fixed Costs - Diminishing Sensitivity

“Can the Market Multiply and Divide? Non-Proportional Thinking in Financial Markets” - Kelly Shue (source)

This isn’t a study made by a famous investor. However, it’s a good one to read if you have the time for it.

Summarizing it, the vast majority think in dollars, net worth and nominal changes. This is why one of more infamous comments “wealth is relative” makes people so upset. All these calculations for $1,000,000 without considering what it’ll buy later and what it means to be “rich”. Rich is more of a percentile game in net worth not income or dollars. (Again. Top 1% wealth can generate top 1% income without working!)

You actually see this in markets as the paper shows that low priced stocks react bigger to news vs. high prices stocks even if you control for market cap! It is massive. If the price doubles (nominal, not market cap fully diluted etc) the volatility actually drops!

If the majority of people thought in percentage terms, the moves would be similar. In fact, they went as far as to show that reverse splits caused percentage changes to go down, IE. clear indicator that nominal is what drives the typical human.

Apply This Today: This is one of the major reasons we stated many times publicly that we need to change the denominator for Bitcoin and crypto in general. If we came up with a new name for a Bitcoin such as “hBTC” (move the decimal twice) it would lead to $704 per coin. The upside and downside here is clear. It would swing more on the downside in bears and swing more on the upside in bull markets.

If you’re young, you want volatility and this would help a ton.

Other Odd Benefit: If you want to lighten up your percentage swings, you would buy assets with higher stock prices (not market cap) during the peaks and you want to buy smaller stock prices (not market cap) during the down years.

This is what the data shows and also explains **part** of the reason for high-beta stocks coming with lower nominal numbers

Extra Bonus: Gotta hand one W out for the bankers on this one. Stock splits actually do help. If your goal is to drive up volatility, split the stock price!

Summary Put It All Together

To put all these seemingly unrelated comments into practice you can actually create better performance as follows.

• First, you quit/retire etc during a bear. You want to collect a severance/layoff package at the lows and you want to anchor to percentage declines not net worth if the duration is long

• Second, you would want to create a larger nominal cash position every year there is an up stock market year (increasing the nominal every year the market is up)

• Third, you can make this even more intense by looking at the actual stock prices. You’d buy more of Berkshire in 2021/2025 than you would of the QQQ simply because the price of Berkshire is huge and is largely a market indicator

• Fourth, you would reverse this. Look at beat up tech names in the bear and actually put slightly more money into the lower nominal value stocks - even though it does not make sense

• Fifth, when stocks splits happen, volatility will pick up. IE. Options pricing will likely change

• And of course the standard: Test more of your WiFi/E-com/SaaS/any biz during ***downturns***. This is when market shares shift and if you’re up vs market in a bear, you’ll be up huge in the bull

Hope this was useful to you guys and again, we suggest reading that study if you have the time. We’re sure the majority will just AI the document but its worth scanning at minimum. Good intro to investor psychology if you can are really jammed for time, then at least go through the appendix such as the figure below!

“Can the Market Multiply and Divide? Non-Proportional Thinking in Financial Markets” - Kelly Shue (source)

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

We’re going to do a short Q&A just on the geopolitics stuff since we don’t want the monthly Q&A to be overshadow…

Read more

Part 1: CPI and Powell

Pretty roug…

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Hi, hello, good morning! It’s been two years since I last wrote for Bull’s Substack. If you don’t remember me, I go by Fawn around these parts, and I’m one of the founders behind NOBS Toothpaste Tablets.

Back in October 2023, we were running a 7-figure toothpaste business while working full-time jobs. Calvin, Ilon, and I were operating entirely off of caffeine, delusion, and spite, working before our day jobs started and after they ended (...and during).

Ilon was still practicing dentistry full-time. Calvin was juggling raising two kids with running his companies and working his W2. I had two monitors set up so I could do NOBS work while on camera in meetings for my W2, all while walking on the treadmill at 3.7mpH because sitting still felt like wasting time.

We somehow convinced ourselves this was sustainable.

It wasn’t.

Fast forward to February 2026, and NOBS Toothpaste Tablets are sitting on Target shelves across America. Calvin and I quit our jobs. Ilon scaled back to practicing dentistry part-time. The business partner you didn’t know existed is now public. And we’ve got a peer-reviewed study proving our toothpaste works as well as Sensodyne.

So. What happened in the last few years?

A lot of wins. Some losses. And a masterclass in why you can’t build a real brand without making a damn good product.

Here’s the full story.

Part 1: The Team You Didn’t Know Existed

If you read our previous posts, you might have noticed something: I only ever talked about two founders. Me (as Fawn) and Ilon (as Gator).

Well. There’s actually a third person, and I like to call him the puppetmaster.

Meet Calvin.

Calvin is our CEO. He brings a decade of experience in business and digital strategy, and he’s been running the company alongside Ilon and me.

So why didn’t we mention him before?

He asked us not to.

Calvin valued his privacy and didn’t want his name attached to the brand publicly. Fair enough. We respected that.

But in 2024, things changed. We were dealing with a counterfeit crisis (more on that later), and our credibility was taking a hit. People needed to see that NOBS wasn’t just a couple of anonymous cartoon animals running a TikTok Shop.

We needed to show we were real people building a real company.

So, in the summer of 2025, Calvin and Ilon both decided to go public with their identities. Calvin is @CalvinandNOBS on Twitter. Ilon is @theNOBSdentist.

And me? I’m staying pseudonymous for now.

Here’s the thing: Ilon is a brilliant dentist with years of clinical experience. Calvin has a decade of expertise in business. They’re both established in their own right.

Plus, they’re both building other things that benefit from having personal brands - Ilon’s working on a longevity clinic and the Institute for Functional Dentistry, and Calvin’s got his own projects going.

Me? That’s it, I’m just me. No doctorate, no prior business experience. Doxxing myself wouldn’t lend credibility to NOBS, so it would just mean I’d have to give up my privacy for no real benefit.

So for now, you can just call me Fawn.

Part 2: TikTok, Huberman, and Going Viral

In October 2023, we got access to TikTok Shop.

TikTok was the wild west back then. Most brands hadn’t figured it out yet, and we saw an opportunity. We made a strategic bet to focus on TikTok instead of Meta, and it paid off like crazy.

Why?

TikTok’s native affiliate infrastructure.

We set up TikTok Shop, started posting content, and worked with affiliates. For a few months, we were growing steadily but nothing explosive. Then spring 2024 hit, and we took off.

A few affiliates started promoting NOBS hard, and we exploded on TikTok. Our kids’ toothpaste went out of stock a few times, but overall we were able to keep up with demand.

Then in March 2024, Andrew Huberman gave us an organic shoutout on his podcast.

Huberman has one of the biggest health and wellness podcasts in the world. When he mentions your product, people listen. The shoutout validated what we’d been saying all along: NOBS is a legitimate, science-backed toothpaste that actually works.

So where does TikTok stand today in February 2026?

It still works. But it’s harder.

Not only has the algorithm changed, but the affiliate network isn’t what it was in 2024, and you’re competing for the same set of eyeballs with 10x the amount of brands (and most of them have way bigger budgets than you do).

You can still win on TikTok, but you need to be more strategic now. What worked for us going from 0 to 1 in 2023 is not going to work for you in 2026. It’s not the gold rush it used to be.

Part 3: Quitting Our Jobs (And What We Did With All That Time)

By Q2 2024, the math was simple.

Calvin, Ilon, and I were all spending more time on NOBS than our actual jobs. We were making more money from the business than our salaries. Every hour we spent in meetings for our W2s was an hour we weren’t spending growing NOBS.

The opportunity cost was too great.

So Calvin and I quit. Ilon kept practicing dentistry full-time for a while longer, but eventually scaled back to part-time.

What We Actually Did With the Extra Time

SEO.

We built out our blog and invested time into link building to grow our domain authority.

Here’s how it works: imagine you have a friend who’s recommended restaurants to you for five years, and every single one has been good. When they make a new recommendation, you trust it immediately.

That’s how Google views websites with high domain authority. When trusted sites link to you, Google assumes you’re trustworthy too. That’s link juice!

In hindsight, we should have focused more on PR during this period. When the counterfeit crisis hit (again, more on that later), we were hurt by the fact that there was basically no information about NOBS on reputable websites or in magazines.

We didn’t have that third-party credibility when we needed it most.

TikTok

As I mentioned earlier, this is one of the most important things we ever did, and we got lucky with the timing. With outliers, there is always an element of luck.

When we got on TikTok Shop in October 2023, the platform was subsidizing sellers. TikTok would offer NOBS at a 50% discount to new customers and then make us whole on the backend.

It makes sense, right? They wanted brands to succeed in order to incentivize more brands to onboard eventually. Think Uber crushing everyone else with unsustainable low prices in the 2010s.

Plus affiliates could actually make money through the native infrastructure which was radical at the time (still is tbh but I think the rapid technological advancements are compressing time in a way we’re not biologically wired to understand so we’re becoming numb to innovation), so they had real incentive to promote products they believed in.

We focused on TikTok instead of Meta, and it paid off. Spring 2024 was when we really took off. Calvin had focused what little spend we had to offer at the time on reach campaigns, creating a sense of virality around NOBS on the platform that made creators want to hop on the trend. A few affiliates started promoting NOBS hard, and the platform’s native affiliate infrastructure did the rest.

But the ecosystem was also just better quality back then. Fewer brands competing for affiliates. The affiliates themselves were more loyal, actually posted when they received samples, and created authentic content instead of bottom-of-funnel spam.

By 2026, things have changed. The platform isn’t subsidizing sellers anymore (that ended in mid 2024). Because of dilution, affiliates can’t make the same money, so there’s less incentive. It’s a new era and one we’re still learning how to navigate.

Podcasts.

We sponsored a lot of health podcasts back then, including Dark Horse with Bret and Heather Weinstein (we actually started that in spring 2023). Dark Horse worked well. So did some others.

We don’t do as much with external podcast sponsorships anymore.

Our thesis: when something works, you run it into the ground until it stops working, then you pivot. We don’t make unnecessary pivots. If a channel is working, we keep doing it. When it stops working, we move on.

The Mistakes Other People Make

The biggest mistake we see people make is quitting their job before the company can actually sustain them.

Your W2 is the easiest money you’ll ever make. Plus you get health insurance, which matters even more if you have dependents.

Remember Bull’s formula: don’t quit your job until your company does 2x your salary in profit so you could survive a downturn if needed.

We waited longer than we had to. We reinvested everything and to this day we take very little out of the business.

Here’s why that matters: if you start pulling money out before the company can sustain you, you make decisions that prioritize short-term revenue. Those decisions kill your long-term brand equity.

You can’t make good decisions from a place of scarcity. As we know, lady luck favors those that don’t need her.

What Surprised Me

More time meant more opportunities to chase things that don’t actually matter.

We call this squirrel brain, and Calvin sends a squirrel emoji in the group chat when Ilon or I voice our latest ~bright idea~ of the week.

Calvin taught us from the beginning (military background) that NOBS was never going to become a bloated organization. Everything at the company is managed by one of the three of us.

Division of labor, minimal redundancy.

When we were all working full-time W2s, we couldn’t focus on anything that didn’t directly drive the business. In some ways, we need to get back to that level of hyperfocus.

The Burnout Reality

So yes - productivity went up initially because we had more hours and more bandwidth. And it lasted for a while.

But right now, in March 2026, I think I’m experiencing true burnout for the first time.

After unexpectedly losing a few loved ones in rapid succession over the last six months, I didn’t realize I might be experiencing “depression”. Quotes because this is not diagnosable, the word doesn’t feel quite right, and it is temporary.

Mostly I think grieving manifests differently for high functioning individuals.

As I joked to Calvin a few nights ago, I’m too neurotic to develop a vice to blow off steam. I still get out of bed every morning, get my work done, exercise, socialize. I look functional.

But my body started breaking down.

I was nearly immobilized on New Year’s Eve from back spasms. My eyes stopped producing lubrication for a few weeks, I couldn’t put my contacts in. I should’ve got treated for a knee injury a year ago, now walking hurts. My memory is deteriorating. It takes me a minute to get a sentence out sometimes. Words are constantly on the tip of my tongue.

After three trusted friends (totally separate instances by the way, they don’t know each other) sat me down and told me they were worried about me within 10 days of each other, I realized what was happening.

So here’s what I’ve learned:

High-functioning people probably don’t realize they’re burning out until their body and brain start sending signals that are impossible to ignore.

The irony is that taking care of your physical and mental health actually is productive. My productivity is dropping now because my brain isn’t working anymore.

Can’t say I really regret it though. All of this is solvable, and how else are you supposed to find your limits?

So When Should You Actually Quit?

We can’t answer that for you. Ask yourself: can your company withstand a serious drawback in revenue? Would you actually be generating more revenue if you had more time and bandwidth, or do you just hate having a job?

Calvin, Ilon, and I knew it was time because the opportunity cost was too great not to quit. If that’s not the case for you, why quit? This isn’t meant to be rhetorical, it’s a question you should ask yourself.

Part 4: The Counterfeit Crisis

The counterfeiting really started in 2024, maybe late 2023. By mid to late 2024, it was out of control.

NOBS has been counterfeited over 5,000 times.

These are guys mostly operating out of China. They’re like a Hydra. You cut down one listing, they spin up another. Or they run up a fake listing, get tons of reviews, then swap everything out for fake pictures of NOBS.

People buy from those listings because they undercut our price. I don’t know why people think you can get a nano hydroxyapatite toothpaste for $4, but they do. They buy it thinking they’re buying from us. They get something terrible, think it’s NOBS, and lord knows what these counterfeits are actually putting in there.

The Business Impact

We were losing a ton of money every month and not just from actual sales.

We had to pull back our ad spend because any money Calvin put toward ads would just drive people to buy counterfeits. People would see the fakes were cheaper than actual NOBS, not realizing there’s a reason they were cheaper.

And because we weren’t spending as much money on ads, we didn’t have as much money coming in. Vicious cycle.

What We Did About It

We did a ton of DMCA takedowns. IPCC through TikTok. Ilon hired a firm to handle counterfeits for us.

All of this in tandem, and we still have counterfeits popping up every now and again. It’s just not nearly as bad as it was.

A large part of that is because we have our IP locked down now.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last three and a half years, it’s that you need good counsel and you need to get your intellectual property locked down ASAP.

How Calvin and Ilon Going Public Helped

Calvin, as the CEO, is able to talk to creators and affiliates on TikTok. They trust him, he knows what he’s talking about.

Ilon, as the dentist behind the brand, is able to help dispel rumors about nano hydroxyapatite and why it’s safe.

Customers trust us more now.

Customer Communication

We did a few things well to combat this issue by directly talking to customers.

Calvin, as the CEO, is able to talk to creators and affiliates through his personal TikTok account. They trust him because it’s obvious he knows what he’s talking about.

I started making a lot of videos on TikTok, voicing over B-roll as I prefer to be faceless, directly responding to customer questions almost like a quote tweet. Those performed organically and converted well, so Calvin put ad spend behind them which amplified the message.

We also put emphasis on our customer service team. We don’t use AI agents for customer service, everything has a personal touch.

Ilon has this customer service stuff on lock. That’s his baby. He’s almost as proud of the fact that if you email us, you get a response in less than 24 hours as he is of the actual NOBS formula. Usually it’s in less than a couple of hours, every day of the week.

Still Happening

This is still happening in 2026, but not nearly as bad as it was before.

The most frustrating part? There is very little protection given to American sellers on American soil. The fact that counterfeits can come in internationally and we’re not protected as a small business is tough to swallow.

Part 5: Building Real Credibility

In the first six months of 2025, I put NOBS in the hands of over 3,000 dental professionals by running the dental conference circuit with Don’t Die and ShopTalk thrown in. Ilon and Calvin joined me for a few of these too.

My role is simple: I’m bubbly, quick-witted, and tough to rattle so it turns out I’m a great salesperson (didn’t know it until I started doing this). In a fun way, I educate dental professionals on the evolving science behind nano hydroxyapatite and NOBS. These conversations are important because they inspire trust.

This matters for us in particular because a lot of dentists and hygienists show up and say something like: “My patient asked me about this. They said they found it on TikTok, so I told them not to use it.”

And I get to respond: “Oh hi, NOBS are dentist-formulated, and we have actual peer-reviewed evidence backing it up. Here’s a copy of the study showing NOBS is as effective as Sensodyne!”

What I Learned About Medical Professionals

Here’s the thing about medical professionals: they really don’t keep up with emerging science.

Nano hydroxyapatite has been around since the 1980s. There’s tons of evidence, specifically in the last 15 years, about how great it is for your teeth including remineralization, enamel protection, and sensitivity relief.

It’s equally as effective as fluoride with a better safety profile.

A lot of people just don’t know this.

So you have to be there, in person, willing to talk to them about it and instill confidence (which I am because I love people and it turns out that that is actually not common).

But if it’s so important, why did I stop?

If you run the circuit for a while, you’ll end up seeing the same people, so the ROI diminishes each bout. Glad I did it, but it’s a low ROI activity now. We have bigger fish to fry!

The Peer-Reviewed Study

In May 2025, a peer-reviewed study was published showing what we already knew: NOBS works.

The study showed that NOBS at 5% nano hydroxyapatite is equally as effective as Sensodyne.

Without. Any. Fluoride.

This is huge.

A lot of people don’t believe that there’s actual evidence behind nano hydroxyapatite being effective. But there is. Nano hydroxyapatite is extremely safe. It dissolves rapidly in gastric acid. Your body already makes it. It’s a biocompatible alternative to fluoride, and it’s really good for sensitivity.

We also had Indiana University test the RDA of NOBS. RDA stands for Relative Dental Abrasivity, which measures how abrasive a toothpaste is on your enamel.

NOBS came back at 21.3.

For context, your average drugstore toothpaste probably has an RDA closer to 150 or 200, and brushing your teeth with just water and a soft-bristled toothbrush has an RDA of 4.

Side note:

A lot of people think charcoal toothpaste or eggshell toothpaste is good for your teeth. It’s not. They’re extremely abrasive ingredients and can damage your enamel over time.

That was one of the first things Ilon and I talked about when we were formulating NOBS. He said under no circumstances could NOBS have eggshell or charcoal in it because they’re both too abrasive. And NOBS couldn’t contain bentonite clay because most sources of bentonite clay are heavily contaminated with lead.

Every now and again, I’ll take a dental question like that in front of Ilon before he can respond, then look at him like this:

And we’ll dissolve into a fit of giggles, because . . . how in the world did we even get here?

Building a Real Brand

Here’s the thing: NOBS is a really good product.

We have peer-reviewed evidence, and Ilon’s a genius dentist (I’m not just saying that because he’s going to read this draft before it goes out).

We built NOBS from the beginning specifically to appeal to the alternative health crowd because we knew that was coming to mainstream America.

Everything that starts on Twitter eventually reaches everybody else later. All these health trends (seed oils, no fluoride, plastic-free etc.) gain traction early on Twitter.

If you use NOBS today, you’re an early adopter.

We’re already seeing this with RFK putting a spotlight on the dubious safety profile of fluoride.

At the end of the day, the real money isn’t in quick flips or viral moments. The greatest value is in building a brand people love around products people actually want to keep using.

If you want to make money quickly, go learn affiliate. We always joke that affiliates make more money than us because it’s true. We also joke that we get paid in credit card points instead of cash (s/o Calvin’s maniacal ad spend).

E-commerce is tough, and it works best if your product is legitimately good.

Part 6: The Rebrand

At some point in 2025, we made a decision: we were rebranding from biöm to NOBS.

The reason was simple. Everyone called it NOBS anyway. Nobody said “I use biöm toothpaste tablets.” They said “I use NOBS.”

So we leaned into it.

We updated the packaging, refreshed the branding, and phased out the old biöm name as inventory turned over. October 15th, 2025, the rebrand went live.

We were really stressed about the launch. We had a whole plan. Email campaigns. Social announcements. Messaging strategy. The works.

We launched it and... really nobody cared.

Customers just kept buying NOBS like they always had. The name on the jar changed. Life went on.

Here’s what did matter: the counterfeit crisis trained customers to verify authenticity by looking for the biöm branding and certain packaging details to make sure they weren’t getting a fake.

Now we have new packaging, and some customers think it’s counterfeit.

That’s a whole other problem, but it’s fine.

Part 7: The Sample Tubes

Getting Into Dental Offices

By fall 2025, we had developed something we’d been thinking about for a while: sample tubes. Chapstick-sized tubes with 6 tablets in each one.

The glass jars are great, but they’re heavy so they’re tough to ship en masse. Sample tubes don’t break, they’re lightweight, and they’re much easier if we’re sending out 500 at a time. More importantly, they’re perfect for dental offices to hand out in goodie bags.

This was something dental offices had been asking us for. A lot of dentists want a fluoride-free toothpaste they can give to patients, and a lot of patients were already asking for NOBS specifically at their appointments. So dentists were basically just waiting for us to give them a way to do this.

Lift off was pretty simple. Ilon has about 90,000 followers on Twitter, and a lot of them are dentists or know of dentists that would be interested. He tweeted about our free dental samples program to kick things off. We also use a platform called Free Dental Samples where we direct dental professionals through social media.

The first couple packs are free. Eventually offices will have to pay for them at cost because while we’re not looking to make money off this, we can’t be bleeding money either.

We also wholesale full jars to verified dental offices, but we’re very careful about who we work with. The counterfeit crisis taught us to be cautious about resellers.

Brand Activations

Beyond dental offices, we’re doing a lot of sampling and seeding at events. Pilates events, wellness events, bachelorette parties, etc. I can sponsor anything and get NOBS in front of people, and then people are tagging us all over Instagram and social media, so it’s all about exposure.

Here’s the thing: in 2026, if you want to be a real brand, you have to be omnichannel. You have to be in retail, you have to be online, and you need to be getting your product into customers’ hands physically

(I am NOT saying you should be doing that to start. We’re talking about scale.)

This matters more now than it did a few years ago because a lot of people don’t trust what’s happening on the internet. The counterfeit crisis on TikTok Shop scared people away from buying anything on that platform. Half the population will only buy on Amazon if it has the Prime badge because that’s a signal of trust.

Brand activations are the same thing. You’re just signaling trust in a different way.

The other reason this works for us is that NOBS is an unusual product. Toothpaste tablets aren’t normal yet. If you’ve never heard of toothpaste tablets or you’ve never heard of NOBS, you’re not going to understand what you’re getting in your goodie bag at some event. But if you already have some level of brand awareness, and now you’re like “I finally get to try this product I’ve always wanted to try,” you’re way more likely to get hooked.

And once people try it, this phenomenon happens where it’s like when you learn a new word and all of a sudden you see that word everywhere. Same thing with NOBS. Once you try it, you start noticing it.

The goal is to push about 100,000 sample tubes per month in sampling right now. I know NOBS is amazing, so we just have to get people to try it one time.

Part 8: The Target Launch

Target was always the goal. NOBS is a premium toothpaste, so we needed a premium retailer that matched our demographic.

In August, we flew out to Minneapolis to pitch them in person at their HQ. They rejected us but later came back and asked us to come into their beauty minis section.

Now we’re in about 917 stores across the country.

The Retail Learning Curve

Here’s what you don’t realize about retail until you’re in the thick of itl: it’s unbelievably slow.

Retailers generally do resets twice a year. If you’re not already in conversations with them, you’re looking at 2027 before you’d even hit shelves. The timeline is brutal.

Then there’s all the stuff you’d never know if you only have e-commerce experience. Net 60 payment terms, which means you’re waiting two months to get paid. Slotting fees just to get shelf space. Sometimes you’re on consignment, which ties up all your inventory and cash.

The whole thing made me appreciate DTC even more. We started with ecom, built up brand awareness, and learned how to actually sell the product before we ever touched retail. That turned out to be a massive advantage.

Because NOBS is the #1 toothpaste on TikTok, Target is not only buying our product but they’re also buying our ability to drive traffic to their stores.

Launch Day Reality

We officially went live on February 22nd. You can find your nearest store here.

I went to 4 stores in my city that day and . . . NOBS was only actually on the shelves in one of them, lol.

In the other 3 stores, nobody knew where it was. At one store, an employee was eventually able to find our inventory “in the back” and handed me a jar to look at, then told me I couldn’t actually buy it because they weren’t putting it out for a few more days.

Retail moves like molasses. You get spoiled by DTC where you can ship something the next day and then you hit retail and realize nothing happens fast.

The Packaging Strategy

We had already redesigned the packaging for the rebrand, but we knew retail was coming. That was part of the broader strategy.

The new jar says “toothpaste tablets” and “without the BS” right on the front. We needed people to understand what they were looking at on the shelf, especially if they’d never heard of toothpaste tablets before.

It’s only been a couple weeks, but early data shows we’re beating projections. Not by a crazy amount, but we’re doing better than what we were told would be good performance.

Finally, What’s Next?

It’s been less than 3.5 years since we started NOBS, and we’re bullish on 2026.

We spent the last few years focusing on TikTok. Now we’re shifting more focus to Meta to expand our awareness there. The big priority is Target; we need to crush it in these 917 stores so they pick us up again and hopefully bring in our kids toothpaste and floss too.

Outside of NOBS, Ilon, Calvin, and TJ (founder of Outty) launched a health show called Down to Health. It’s Twitter-first, meaning episodes launch directly on the platform. NOBS sponsors it. They bring on interesting people to talk about health topics and generally just have a good time. You should check it out.

Ilon’s also building a longevity clinic and lecturing for the Institute for Functional Dentistry, but I’ll let him share more about those when he’s ready.

If I could go back and tell myself three things, it would be: get excellent legal counsel, choose excellent partners, and learn to build resilient systems as you scale..

We’ve made a lot of mistakes. We’ve also done a lot of things right. The product is amazing, the team is strong, and somehow, it still feels like we’re just getting started.

All my love,

Fawn

Bonus - Gator/Fawn

As a note NOBS/Gator/Fawn/Calvin are going to give away 10 lifetime subscriptions to this Substack. If you follow their X account you’ll see them post the contest!

The general idea is: ”Competition will be creating a image/video to promote NOBS being in target nationwide. Real footage preferred.”

Easy enough and enjoy the week!

For more exciting content like this be sure to join our Substack!

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

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People have been asking the wrong question “How Much Revenue Have You Made From AI”. The correct question is the one we’ve highlighted numerous times now for large to small businesses. It removes/cuts down the need for a large number of employees. That is a cost saving innovation not a revenue generation innovation **for now**

Read more

With that we’ll hand it entirely over to TJ (BowtiedBroseidon - got hit by X/Twitter back in the day)

As Usual, 100% of the test below is written by TJ. We’re not involved in the day to day of Outgoing Co.

Introduction

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is TJ Bongiorno (formerly Bowtied Broseidon) and I am the founder of The Outgoing Co (Formerly Ramp Health) - We’ll address both of those “formers” in this article.

A little over 2.5 years ago I launched the above-mentioned supplement brand and did a write-up of the entire process that you can read here.

There’s been a lot that’s gone on between then & now and I’m going to do my best to recap while also offering some actionable insights and plans for the future.

I’m not one for sharing revenue numbers (for a multitude of reasons) but I will give a range to add some credibility and set the stage. We are currently sitting at $100k-$500k/mo in top-line revenue, with more than 100k of that coming from subscriptions. We are targeting $1m/mo over the next 6 months and believe we have the capital and infrastructure to do so but only time (and proper execution) will tell.

The single biggest factor in getting to this point was changing the offer, which we did with the rebrand in January of this year. We switched from trying to be first-order profitable -> focusing on subscriptions, MRR, and LTV.

I’ll break all of this down further below.

Important

If you follow me already, you know that for better or for worse, I am very straightforward and truthful about the business and where it’s at - it really bothers me when “gurus” lie and create false hope or worse… a false sense of being “behind”.

To this point, there’s a few things you should know:

• I took on some investment funds from an individual (not institutional)

• I receive a ton of guidance and learning directly and indirectly from Calvin & Ilon at Nobs

• I’ve made a metric ton of *expensive* mistakes

I say all this to make it very clear that this is not some heroic, bootstrapped, solo-founder wonderboy story.

It takes a village.

Mistakes

I’m going to start off talking about the biggest mistakes I made over the last 2.5 years to leverage good ‘ol recency bias, and hope you forget by the end of the article.

I burned a lot of cash testing ads & trying to make TikTok work.

I got burned for a decent chunk of change hiring “consultants”.

I brought on a friend with extensive startup experience for a few months and paid them a salary higher than mine.

I ran out of product 3 separate times for 3 separate reasons.

I ignored the importance of Trademarks and Intellectual property and had to rebrand the entire company.

I didn’t fight for terms with manufacturers and almost ran out of cash more than once.

Took on some bad debt.

Hired some bad agencies & outsourced too much too early.

And this isn’t even the half of it…

It’s really easy to read this list as an observer and think, “what a [redacted]” but the reality is that this is my first real business and all of the above seemed like the correct play at the time. I also am now of the opinion that all of it taught me more than 3 MBAs ever would and… we came out on the other side ok, didn’t we?

Moving on

Trademarks & IP

In the past, the advice given by others (and even myself) was don’t overanalyze the name, logo, domain, product name, etc… just start and worry about it later.

It is with great regret that I inform you that this is no longer sound advice if you are trying to build a real brand to be exited one day - if you’re just looking to make cash dropshipping you can probably get away with it still.

With the AI tools available, it’ll take you one 30-minute session to have a name, logo, domain, etc… all with most-likely free and clear IP available.

Take the time from the start so you’re not changing your entire business 2.5 years and 7-figures in.

If you’re reading this as someone who has already started and have not applied for any trademarks yet - get on this ASAP.

Don’t trust me? Then listen to Calvin from Nobs. (insert angry calvin tweet about IP)

Finances & Cash Flow

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the spreadsheet autism. I got the product, marketing, and vision kind. And while I am very happy & aware of my talents… it was an uphill battle to get a grasp of the business’s finances as things grew.

The simplest solve for this was the software Iris.

It plugs into every single platform - shopify, amazon, tiktok, meta, quickbooks, etc… and pulls all the data into one place automatically.

They also offer fractional CFO services in addition to their software.

I am not affiliated in any way just a friend of Drew the founder and a big fan of the platform.

It saved me - full stop.

Whether you use a spreadsheet, software, fire someone, or any other option available, cash flow becomes one of the most important aspects as you scale. Especially if you’re running an MRR focused model like we are.

I’m giving his grumpy self way too much credit in this article but Calvin is masterful at this - it’s what’s allowed nobs to scale in the way they have.

Subscriptions & Offer

If I had to guess, this is the section most of you are most interested in. That sweet, sweet MRR. That juicy SaaS-like revenue-multiple exit. The “free” cash flow every month.

When we changed over to the new name and branding, we also made a shift in the main offer. The business model shifted from trying to be first-order profitable via AoV increases to focusing on subscriptions.

Prior to this change, we had a subscription as an option for a 10% discount, but didn’t really emphasize it in any way.

We had a, i’m not joking or exaggerating, 3% take rate on subscriptions. THREE PERCENT. And after ~25k+ orders, only had 200ish active subscribers.

We now have a 70%+ take rate on subscriptions and at the time of writing this have multiple thousands of active subscribers.

The biggest change was making the subscription offer front and center + the obvious choice. (currently offering 40% discount on first order)

One thing to note here: we are 100% compliant with this. There are 0 grey or black hat tactics being used.

No hidden subscription, cancellation prevention, reminders are sent 3 days prior, subscription email is sent immediately after purchase, etc..

I always picture my boomer mother buying the product - would she feel scammed? If yes, no good.

Moving forward, the biggest focus for the brand is retention and LTV. This is probably the biggest lever to pull for this business model and will most likely be my first and only hire - tbd.

If you want to learn more about subscriptions, I highly recommend Ecom Moose on both X and YouTube. His content has been insanely valuable.

Also. go look at the brands doing it best: everyday dose, grubs, im8, carpe, primal queen - and many more.

Spy their ads. Click their funnels. Copy their offers and buy boxes. Copy their gifting format.

It’s all out there.

Utilizing AI

If you’re looking for a mega-autist, automated AI ecom guide… I’m not your guy.

We utilize it in two main ways:

1 - I, as the founder, use a combination of gemini and claude for a multitude of tasks every single day. Nothing ground-breaking just every day LLM and Co-Work stuff.

2. My main man, Wifi Money Guy was brought on last year to be a part of the brand and focus solely on building AI tools for us. Without revealing too much, he has built us a custom “AI CMO” that can scrape angles, generate both image and video ads, analyze ad data, and more.

Aside from the obvious benefits from a scaling POV, we feel this can & will be a gigantic ad to the overall enterprise value of the business when the time comes that we look to exit.

As the kid would say… this is cooking.

Creative Volume & Content

This is the last piece that I want to touch on - content.

If you follow me, you’ve most likely seen a huge increase over the last few weeks and months.

Ilon, Calvin, and I launched our own health show - Down To Health.

I post personal brand content on IG, TikTok, and X.

I post personal rband content on IG, TikTok, and X.

I’ve been jumping on as many podcasts as possible as a guest.

Having all of the above long-form content clipped for short-form posting.

Hiring Josh Suggs at StreetTalk for street interview-style content.

Using platforms like Collabstr to hire influencers and creators.

Utilizing Tiktok affiliates and paying them for rights to their videos to run off platform.

Ronaldo Delduca (the agency we use) pumps creatives, angles, funnels, and more weekly.

Founder ads and founder content (The main reason I doxxed myself). I want to emphasize that I am all in on founder content and will be putting a huge portion of my focus here for the rest of the year.

The AI tool, Wifi Money Guy has built.

The list goes on and on but the point is that we currently have a surplus of content.

The volume required is like 5x what you think, and it’s what takes up the majority of my time these days, but it’s also a huge lever to pull, and what you see every brand that “makes it” focuses on. Content + community/affiliates.

You need to become a media company that sells a product - not the other way around.

Closing thoughts

I hope this was both informative and actionable for you all. I wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to take this, but a combination of guide & update felt right.

Please keep in mind that I am by no means an expert; I still only have less than 3 years of Ecom experience, and have not “made it yet”.

Everything above is what I’ve learned from doing the thing the last few years + observing what others are doing.

Ignore the blackpillers. Ignore the doomers.

This is the best time in human history to start a business. You can have a multi-7-figure business with ZERO employees. Only contractors and AI tools.

I also feel like M&A activity will pick up over the next 24 months, and it will be a great time to have a business to sell.

If you read this whole thing, go start your brand RIGHT NOW.

We will never be a part of the permanent underclass, right?

Final note: No, I do not offer consulting & I will not “hop on a call so you can pick my brain”. I legitimately do not have the time or mental space to do so right now.

BTB Thoughts and Notes

First, we don’t agree when TJ says he didn’t make it. While the digits on the screen might not be where he “wants”, if you read this you can tell he already gets the process. Said differently, would you assign a 90%+ failure rate to another venture? Yeah we wouldn’t either.

Vast majority just look at statistics and don’t realize building is no different than any other skill (golf swing, typing speed, music instruments, etc.). Once you’re good at one, your chances of failure plummet. No. They don’t go to zero. You will still miss some swings/shots. It just means the failure rate is no where near the doomer 90% number

Second, notice the major shift to LTV and retention. It’s one of the big signs of future success. We could care less if some passer by doesn’t stick around. Your goal is to create high retention and extremely high value *relative* to the industry. If you’re charging $50 for a product that typically costs $100 (and yours is better). We can assure you that you will continue to gain market share assuming your ads are just as good. Both companies lose money if the economy is down, however, you would be gaining market share! That’s the game. If someone is around with a high LTV for a long time, this builds long term trust that its the best “bang for your buck”. Best bang for your buck doesn’t mean perfect. Never will

Third, TJ has high self awareness. You can see he knows his weak spots and outsourced. The only thing we noticed is he probably shot gunned a bit by making a large number of outsourcing decisions. Everyone learns differently. Do you think he’d make the same mistakes in project two? Yep you guessed it. He won’t.

On that note awesome update from TJ! We’ll keep in touch as it grows and expands in the future. We did in fact post some ways to use AI to get started and had a post in February as well on how to integrate once off the ground. So go ahead and check those out on the paid stack or enjoy keeping up with the jungle as we move into the right side of that K-shape economy.

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

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Part 1: Lifestyle Creep Happens Quickly

Most mainstream advice says “save 10% of your income for life and you’re good”. This is dated. Careers do not extend into your 60s. Highly competitive fields typically die off in middle age (40s). And. It does a poor job accounting for layoffs, one time events, life events and of course inflation.

Frugality Guys Get a Kick Out of the Website (Source)

In the new world order, you need an exit event or a high earning WiFi money secondary income stream. Please do not fall down the trap of trying to live on lentils and tap water. Life is far too short. If you’re willing to suffer to that level, you’re better off earning more money and working much harder.

There is a limit to cost cutting. There is no ceiling to earning more.

How the Creep Starts

Now that you understand the standard NPC belief “Save 10-20% in S&P 500 and spend the rest for life”. You can see how the initial life style spending trap begins.

A good phrase for this is “luxury peasant” or “white collar slavery”

In this context a peasant is someone who is entirely controlled by someone else. If someone is entirely reliant on a single entity for money, that’s a one way street. Instead of realizing this, they start purchasing items that make them more entrenched and dependent on the system: 1) luxury car, 2) expensive vacations, 3) private school, 4) expensive watch, 5) country club, 6) luxury hotels, 7) business class flights and 8) anything else that creates ***external validation*** of “making it”

This is a high-stress lifestyle with minimal resiliency. If your burn rate continues to increase net worth remains flat, freedom actually goes down and expectations go up. Not a great combination.

The entire system is set up like this by design. Higher wage/income increases in your 20s. They know most people settle down around 30s. Then they put on the handcuffs as you’re locked down with mortgage, auto and student loan debt (or other types of debt/lifestyle expenses).

Goal of company is complete. Income went up but lifestyle ate it all up. Results in limited savings. That treadmill just went from 5mph to 10mph and you can’t get off it for the next 20+ years.

General Concept

A lot of high earning people develop large egos. They worked hard through college and “deserve” the best. While they earn a lot of money on paper, the fixed costs eat into their ability to really get ahead.

This creates a rough set up. They are *too* dependent on their W-2. Not only are they not saving money, they are too scared to start something else. Worried it might impact their work quality at the W-2 they desperately need.

Part 2: Look at the Quick Math

If this sounds crazy it’s likely due to limited exposure to high cost of living areas. In that case, you’re working remote or you have WiFi money. An outrageous head start. Likely 20% additional buffer room due to cost of living alone.

Either way here is how the corporate grinder sets you up to run on that treadmill forever.

In Your 20s: They pay you around $200-300K. We’re using a wide band because it includes 21 and 29. Some people will be above this, some below. The general “average” over the mid 20s bracket ends up being somewhere in the $230K-$260K range or so.

Your outlay looks like this on a monthly basis.

• Rent Needs to Be Close to work: $4,000

• Utilities, Internet etc.: $500

• Going Out Related Expenses: $1,200 ($300 per weekend)

• All Food Related Items: $2,000

• Vacation Cost: $1,000

• Gym, haircuts, general wellness: $500

• Clothing, Weddings, other stuff always comes up: $1,500

• Taxes Eat Up about 1/3 of everything (most in high tax states like NYC/CA)

Now you can get to: $240,000 - $80,000 = $160,000 per year.

$13,333 - $4,000 - $500 - $1,200 - $2,000 - $1,000 - $500 - $1,500 = $2,633.

Go ahead and round up and you’re saving around $3,000 a month. Half of that goes to stocks half of that goes to your eventual downpayment on a home.

30s Clamps Come Down: Now that you’ve got about 10 years of experience you should have somewhere around $200,000 set aside for a home. We’ll make it larger and just say $300,000 to adjust for investment gains etc. You’ll see quickly that this doesn’t matter much at all.

Now that you’re in your 30s, living cheap isn’t really an option. You’re stressed out quite a bit and normally people have life events. You also likely went through at least one layoff or extremely rough year at work.

We’ll give a high and generous number of $400,000 as an average here. This is quite good despite what people on X say who think everyone works as an early employee at NVDA or B-lines to MD at Goldman Sachs at age 34.

Some good years ($550K), some bad years ($300K) especially in a recession if no bonuses hit. If this sounds impossible just remember First Republic, Silicon Valley bank and the entire 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

• Housing: $9,000 (Plug in $300K down on a $1.5M place and you’re basically here)

• Cars + transport: $2,000 typically a large uptick due to more meetings/events etc

• Childcare: $2,000

• Food + Restaurants: $3,000

• Travel Vacation/Weekends: $1,000

• Healthcare/Services/Entertainment: $2,000

• Clothes/Other: $1,000/month

The big change here is largely the decision to have a family. If you are not in this camp the math changes and you end up being a low 7-figure person in middle age (emphasis middle age).

$400K - $150K for Tax is around $250K

$20,833 - $9,000 - $2,000 - $2,000 - $3,000 - $1,000 - $2,000 - $1,000 = $833.

Whoopsie! Actually saving less money unless we calculate in your mortgage pay down! Now you understand the below table ***completely***

Source

Easy to become house rich and other asset poor for a long period of time (unless you’re one of the smart ones who builds out WiFi money and gets into the $10M+ camp)

Employment Designed This Way: A lot of you will see a big dispersion in your late 30s. We’ve stated that the dispersion is *larger* than what you see post college/post high school. Yes. We are dead serious.

It happens due to the following reasons: 1) around 30 give or take a lot of people get cut as they can’t make the jump in the W-2 world, 2) people who were building a secondary income stream/business quit or become financially successful, 3) life choices to become a parent or not - huge dispersion in where you live, what you think and how your day operates and 4) 15+ years of investment/saving decisions show up - rough knee in the curve for many people.

Set Up For the Majority

By the time most people hit middle age they are making too much money to take a risk. They are sapped of their energy from their 20s that would allow them to burn the candle on both ends. And. Their savings are nowhere near where most would expect them (because most have never lived in high-paced, high competition, high cost of living environments - not a knock it’s just how the math works).

Late 30s hit and the two big separators: 1) deciding if you want kids and 2) if you made the right risks/decisions to escape this general treading water trap.

For those that really think this isn’t possible, even the frugal types (yes Asians are known for being frugal) explain how their own colleagues get hit in this area

The below person went viral a few months back and explained how it works in tech as well. (source).

Mental Metrics to Avoid This

Even if you don’t want to bet on yourself (***shivers in disappointment***), at least go through this general lifestyle creep list and avoid the major ones.

• Housing payment should assume your income can take a 33% hit. This could be combined with a spouse, could just be you, doesn’t matter. Make sure you’re not buying based on peak earnings or a big revenue year with a big bonus attached

• Assume your car is worth nothing. You can drive something nicer if you want but its not an asset as you have to trade it in for another one anyway

• No discretionary items should be financed under any situation. The only time you should finance something is if it is going to increase in value. IE. get a positive return

• Monthly burn can increase as you earn more, however, the percentage changes needs to be lower than the income growth. This helps: 1) fund your escape plan, 2) invest to help escape or 3) at least give you breathing room to avoid the constant stress and pressure at work

• Spending capacity isn’t wealth. Wealth is when the assets cover your annual fixed spending

• Your scoreboard is how much you’re making when you’re asleep. How much equity you’re building and how quickly you could replace your current income. That’s wealth, power and strength.

Part 3: Onto the Implications

Resentment. This is probably the best word we could come up with to describe what we’re seeing. A lot of people are going into a cycle of resentment. Humans place a lot of identity around being useful and feeling valued.

A chunk of the college educated pool were told “just work hard get degree and you’ll be fine”. That’s drying up. In addition to that, the people who were in the meat grinder for a decade or so are realizing the ladder has been pulled up in a ton of industries. They see what is happening. They are being asked to learn all the new tools, do it with less people and send that product to the “big boss” who then earns a multiple of what they are getting as he/she is the relationship manager.

Nearly $2 Trillion Funded this “Work Hard” Mantra

Now that the carrot isn’t showing up for a large chunk of the population and the generation above them is forced to downsize… it’ll lead to even more social isolation.

Move to the Revenue

We’ve been saying this for over a decade, but now it is essentially a survival tactic. You need to get closer to the revenue this would mean

• Person responsible for selling the product in sizable amounts - bigger customers bigger sales

• Person evaluating the end design and marketing - will it actually be a hit

• Deep domain knowledge that will not show up in a search

Those three items will be requirements for survival for the recently cut people making $200K-500K per year. If you’re in that position (currently) you want to steer your career into one of those three directions. Fighting this will just lead to disappointment and despair.

Value Shifts More to…

Hilariously? Office politics. If you thought that AI would make it easier to pick out the producers, it’ll probably have the exact reverse impact. The person who is most likable and most personable within the firm will be seen as a future revenue generator. Besides, if the head of sales loves the guy, it likely means he will be likable to the same clients they speak to on a day to day basis (logically this adds up a lot better vs. someone who was “super fast and error free in excel”)

This also shifts a lot to the looks-maxxing trend (yes we’re serious). If the safest positions are interpersonal skill based and face to face, it means you want to be “eye candy”. Invest time into your appearance and throw away the elastic band supported clothing.

Dead Zone of Interpersonal Skills + AI Tools Knowledge

This we’re certain of at this point. If you live on X and are constantly looking at the latest and greatest, you feel far behind every 1-3 weeks. Despite implementing every single tool ands seeing revenues go up double digits you feel behind because a new item from Claude got released or a new funnel was discovered.

But guess what, you’re in the top 1% already if you understood all that and are paying attention!

Over the next year or two you’re going to see a new hybrid role at the vast majority of companies. Someone in charge of integrating AI tools and explaining them to people. In addition, a hybrid style AI tool explainer + sales teach in.

Both of those slots will be the new “middle manager” but they will be indispensable. You will get paid to stay on top of the AI tools + generate more revenue + test new products only available to major enterprises.

As usual, you can either accept new technology or complain about it on the internet hoping for a “return to the past”. Not hard to see which decision is right for you.

The saddest man in America is not going to be the poor person who never had a shot at escape. It’s going to be the people who spend like this will last forever, get displaced by AI and fumbles the ball at the one yard line.

You’ve got a golden ticket ahead even in W-2 land. Survive the round, become the go to guy for AI tools and you’ll end up with that paid off house + $3-4M to never worry about this stuff again.

The goal is freedom, not despair or spending due to psychological ego problems.

Part 4: Bonus Asset Side

We realize the spending habits of the upper middle/upper class W-2 worker may shock some of you. The reality will start to hit in the coming 6-9 months though. Instead of seeing a lot of extremely high paying slots of $500K to $1M? You’re going to see the majority of industries switch to a cap of around $300K-350K.

That looks about right to us as a typical high paid corporate worker at a place like Coca-Cola is going to make that type of money. There are only a few ultra rare seats that pay north of $500,000.

Think of a standard pyramid and make it a bit thinner. That’s what you’re looking at in the future.

You Have the Price Cap: If you take our $300,000 number at face value vs. the typical $500,000 high paid W-2 you can back into the products that this type of family would afford without absurd leverage. A single person on $300,000 is likely sticking to a townhome/well located condo. A person with a family would likely get to around $450,000 if we assume one person earns double (highly unlikely they earn the same)

This would net you to a max of a $2,000,000 home or so.

Now you have your rough line in the sand for luxury in the future. If someone is living in a place that requires them to earn north of $450,000 in combined income? It is likely a luxury area in that High cost of living region.

Why does this matter? It matters because any flip/fixer you decide to buy cannot go above that price point under any circumstances. Go through your neighborhood (we’re just doing HCOL for you) and figure out where the price per square foot breaks. Now you know where the maximum value is for that area to flip.

Since we know the majority of White Collar workers do not save significant amounts of money, you can back into what their decision making process will look like.

Again. You shouldn’t care about this as it pertains to your life. You should care about it as it pertains to how you invest and see your social circle evolve.

On that note, you’ll see a lot of these high cost of living blow ups in the next few months. You’ve got the rough math in front of you.

In addition to that, on a brighter note, next Monday we have an update from NOBs on what happens when you actually bet on yourself. You go from a simple e-com enterprise, to a larger e-com enterprise to… Big Time in Target and mainstream consciousnesses

There will be a fun competition in there as well so stay toon’d!

PS: Start that WiFi Biz Anon.

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

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Here will attempt to separate likely f…

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Before jumping in, the statement “not able to invest” is entirely incorrect. If you’re 20 something you should be in a stage of accumulation. This doesn’t just mean a few digits on a screen. It means a wide range of skill sets that can be used to improve your life.

Secondly, everything is cyclical. That is true. When you’re 10 you care about nature and when you’re 70 you care about nature. When you’re nearing death you have zero filter. Children have zero filter. There are a million parallels if you look hard enough.

The circle of life is real.

Important Assumptions

Before we jump in, we are making the assumption that you’re making good decisions. If you found this website and recognize a lot of the major themes: 1) do what you’re amazing at not what you love, 2) 20s is for going all out because you have immense energy, 3) you won’t want the same things at 25 as 45 and 4) Time is the most valuable asset - if you waste it you need to spend 2, 3 or 4x as much energy to get the same results later in life.

On that note we can move on.

Part 1: The General Script Doesn’t Work

Go to school —> Get a W-2 —> Lever up with car/home —> Take a 2 week vacation + complain about politics/economy —> assume anyone who chooses another path got lucky —> wake up at middle age with a pink slip and wonder what went wrong

As you can see, this doesn’t seem like an amazing way to live. If you recognize the problems with each step you can prevent it by changing your belief system: 1) No one is coming to save you, 2) Boss/Politician just using you for profits/votes, 3) most prefer that you don’t improve as it makes them insecure/jealous and 4) there is nothing safe about an income decided by someone else in some humiliating performance review

Big picture, no one hires someone if they think the individual will lose money. This means top performers are getting significantly less than they produce in mega corps.

Majority Give Up: After reading the four points, everyone quits. They believe in magic pills. A knight in shining armor. Or. Some Red/Blue president to completely change their lives. It’s rooted in fantasy vs. reality.

You’ve Got Less Time Than You Think: Don’t believe the old people who tell you to “slow down”. You really don’t have that much time. Realistically, you want to grind extremely hard in your 20s and be financially free by around 40. If you end up being rich by 35 or 45, it’s not worth discussing. The rough range/line in the sand is 40. It’s highly unlikely that someone has zero at 40 and somehow makes up for 40 wasted years in five. You can start when you like. You can make it at any time. However. Getting in your own way reduces the ***probability*** of success by a large margin.

20s: Unless you do something utterly insane (drug/alcohol addiction or worse), you can pretty much do it all. You can work, go out and party 2x a week, build a business and stay in shape. Anyone saying otherwise? They are lying.

The only tricky part is that you need to make smart long-term decisions. If you blow everything on vacations and lifestyle inflation you won’t have enough left over to build your own niche WiFi biz.

Early 30s: You see some separation. You should be above average (by a wide margin) with a realistic path to being set by 40 (plus/minus 5 years). If the path laid out assumes perfect promotions, perfect investments and perfect everything… it isn’t realistic. This is the first sanity check.

Mid-Late 30s: Huge separation in people. Looking back mid to late 30s is a bigger separation than college. Not kidding at all. Socioeconomic split happens around here along with lifestyle split. It’s hard to hang out with someone in a completely different zone (economic or lifestyle choice). You don’t see parents hanging out with non-parents all day. You don’t see single people interested in hanging out with random parents on the weekend. Shared experience begins to drift significantly. Again. Neither is good nor bad. Some people should be parents others definitely should not.

40 Benchmark: At this rough age band, you’re optimizing for time and quality of life. Adding some digits to your name is fun but it isn’t really changing your life at all. Again. If you’re close and didn’t hit 40 on the dot, it just doesn’t matter. The general premise is the same.

Summary

If you are taking your life seriously, you will recognize that your time is extremely limited. The standard path sold to you doesn’t work in excel. Go ahead and plug it in (only works under perfect conditions of no lay offs + star performer straight to hedge fund manager/Managing director/Partner etc.)

While you need that W-2 to just pay bills, its really funding the correct “Funnel” which is: 1) any recurring revenue business, 2) asymmetric investments, 3) skill stack that will be useful in 5-10 years - such as sales and 4) consistent purchase of new cash flowing assets (or building them)

Part 2: Cycles to Remove Single Points of Failure

Everything moves in cycles to your own life. Babies are in diapers and adults near death end up in diapers. Not fun to think about but also how the world works.

If you follow the tea leaves from step one, it means that you need to become self sovereign. This means avoiding a single point of failure. You do not want: 1) one boss deciding your worth, 2) one source of income, 3) one industry determining your future and 4) one skill to pay for everything.

What usually happens? People figure out they can earn money on skill A. That’s great. Then they ignore skill B, C and D. All three of these could be new revenue streams but it is just too “painful” to get started.

Psychologically if you are earning $200K from skill A, it doesn’t make sense to earn $50K from skill B. This is how NPCs think.

A person who understands cycles? They will realize, if A plummets by 50%? Skill B may go up to $100K+. Think that through. Who is in a better position to survive the future. One guy who makes $250K from one task or a person who makes $150K from business A and $100K from business B (with neither business being in the same industry?). It’s clear as day.

Easy to Say Hard to Do

Around 90% of people will ignore all of this. They will double/triple down on one income stream and when it goes away, they will be left scrambling.

Its hard to go through the same painful cycle. It’s even harder to do it when you feel like a genius from one break through. This is also why most people fail.

Source

Level 0 Quitters: They have 50 ideas, complain that it’s all luck and never try to start anything. In the real world, the only way to move the needle is by building immediately. It’ll give you information to adjust. No amount of reading or rumination will compare to simply doing.

Level 1 Quitters: Majority of people don’t even get through the development period. If you did everything correctly as outlined on the paid side of the stack, you know that around year 3 you see inflection. Some people quit at year 3.1 because it wasn’t perfectly 3.0. Others? (the majority) don’t even survive 6 months. They didn’t even bother testing demand (insert chorus of laughter)

Level 2 Quitters: They understand the S-curve but once they get into acceleration/inflection? They just stop. They don’t bother looking into new businesses and think it will be stable forever. Mike Tyson is waiting for these types. It’s no different than a late career layoff. Nothing lasts forever

Theme Here: If you take your foot off the gas before you’re truly done you could do significant damage. Damage measured in years (not months). Much like watering a plant, you can’t quit once its a certain size. It’ll die and once it does, there is no amount of water that’ll fix it.

Same cycle in everything. Max pain and boredom, inflection, max boredom. If you get complacent expect it to go down.

Why It Doesn’t Change

A good implied question we got is “why the cycle doesn’t change”. The answer is the same: human emotions. Also math.

If you feel like a genius it means that all your hard work paid off. The problem (psychologically) is that this payoff was the result of effort five years ago. Once you start to view your life in this manner it’ll make a lot more sense.

Despair = Market Share: Coincidentally it rhymes. We don’t believe in coincidences.

If people are peak negative on the economy, an industry etc. It means that this is the easiest time to gain market share. In the stock market this is reflected in prices as well. If everyone is sure it is “dead” then you should be excited not depressed.

People then go back into the industry, hype starts to pick up and years later everyone is a “genius” and back down we go.

A good rule of thumb for younger people, if your parents are calling you to tell you they are “proud” of you. It’s probably a top signal. If your parents are calling to say you are a disappointment and have no future (it is likely a bottom signal). We’re aware that good parents don’t operate in these emotional extremes but the point is the same. Replace parents with friends/colleagues etc.

Summary

If you view the world from this lens it’ll explain a lot of the doomerism and cyclicality. The majority are constantly in a state of “woe is me” and “life is unfair” which makes it impossible to create the standard luck cycle.

The most successful people you know (celebrities, politicians etc.) all have terrible down years (at some point in their life). The hilarious part? The typical NPC expects perfect from everyone - except themselves.

Part 3: Autonomy and Sovereign

If you’re able to start grinding early (20s as you should) then its pretty easy to solve for decision trees: 1) Does this make me more autonomous and 2) does this make me more sovereign.

If it doesn’t you should skip and if it does you should press forward. If its 50/50 then its a judgement call for you.

Don’t Get Sidetracked

The number of times we get bad/repetitive questions could crash an AWS server. It’s the reason we paywalled for Q&A.

If you are using brain cells to debate a 10% W-2 difference, you’re not really betting on yourself. Or. You’re not convinced in how things shake out long-term. Either answer isn’t great and unless the situation is dramatic it unlikely moves the needle at all (dramatic defined as 30%+ changes in either direction + change in hours + change in equity/upside/downside)

If your boss changes or the new firm doesn’t like you for some reason, is that really worth 10%? Will all the headaches associated with moving/losing political capital be worth it? Is this even going to move the needle.

As you can see the question isn’t that meaningful. Switching from one W-2 to the other doesn’t change autonomy or sovereignty. At all.

It’s a hard mental hurdle to jump through but how serious are you about winning this rigged game?

• Are you building someone else’s dream or your own?

• Is this going to change my freedom or make me more dependent on someone else?

• Are you increasing or decreasing the amount of free time you have?

These are the real questions to ask as they get you closer to the real objective. Which is free to do what you want when you want (as much as possible). There is no childish world view where you have zero obligations 24/7/365. The goal is to: 1) gain more control of your time, 2) lower dependence on single individuals and 3) reduce catastrophic risk.

If you want a boring and annoying example of one we did live here, it was actually in January of 2025. We got bombared with hate comments/mail suggesting it wasn’t going to be good since Trump coin launched. We took a full 3 months off to learn basic real estate flips before looking at crypto again. Avoiding the losses was the least important part. The most important part was learning a new way to make money

While we were deleting emails from people saying SOL was going to $1,000 into the FTX/Galaxy unlock (yes people believed this), we furiously built up a new basic skill set. That’s all you need to do.

If there is a dead period, most people just sink into despair. You’re seeing it right now. Another war breaks out, more AI fears, more quantum computing fears etc. The dead period is the best time to launch new products. If you can succeed when demand is temporarily lower than usual, how much are you going to make when it reverses?

Unsurprisingly, we’re much more excited than the vast majority in 2026. Ideally emotions/sentiment go a bit lower, we’ll still be building.

Summary

Anyone who is in accumulation mode should start thinking in those two terms. Unless there is a massive difference in long-term outcome, just focus on Autonomy and Sovereignty

If you don’t believe this, go ask everyone you know “Would you take a 20% pay cut but work for yourself and no one else ever again?”. They will say yes.

Part 4: Everything You Do Compounds

Most people think of boring S&P 500 7-9% CAGR rules. We’re not talking about that at all. Your friends, business partners, assets, health, habits etc. All of this compounds at a rate of 10% as well.

If you choose the wrong ones for years? You will need to generate higher returns to catch up.

Compound to Get to the K-Shape: If we agree that it’s all rigged for asset holders you have to come up with a strategy to outpace them. The only viable path has been beaten to death here: equity, building on your own. For every unicorn/massive IPO there are millions of failures.

If you talk to wealth management firms they will tell you flat out “our typical client is a small business owner”. You’ve already got your answer and just need to avoid the wrong friends who claim you’ll fail forever (that’s not how this works at all, every failure is closer to success).

The way you compound is no different from a good investment.

• Friends: Do you think the people you talk to most will be where you want to be in 5-10 years? If not you should adjust your time to reflect your goals. You can have friends in different walks of life. Just recognize whoever you talk to most is where you end up

• Business Partners: Ask if you expect them to be bigger or smaller in the future. If the answer is bigger you’re good if the answer is smaller, you’ve made the wrong choice. In the world of work, this is all that matters. You’re not blood relatives the only shared goal is growing

• Health: All the decisions you make in your 20s will show up in your 30s. 30s show up in 40s. So on and so forth. If you think this is a joke, it is not. The guys at the gym who look amazing at 50-60 know a lot more than the latest trending fad.

• Habits: If you journal it makes it easy to recognize emotional highs and lows. The hard part is training your brain to register the signs and act on them correctly. If everything is firing on all cylinders you’ll see it in your own writing style. That’s when you should get back to grinding on the part you expect to break.

• Assets: Repetitive given what we write about 95% of the time. That said, you should have a clear world view and 90-95% of your decisions need to be consistent with that.

If you’re compounding all of these things rapidly, you’ll slowly make headway. Every 3-5 years or so expect a pretty significant jump in standard of living/quality of life. If you’re doing well in all of those, surprise, surprise, it makes it a lot easier to do well in other aspects as well (social, dating, coming up with new biz ideas etc.)

Summary

One of the reasons we get frustrated over minutiae commentary? It’s actually a reflection of the commentator! If someone is using bandwidth on things that don’t matter it means he/she doesn’t even believe in their positions. This is a much bigger problem than the question being asked.

We don’t mind if someone is happy with $500K or $50M. Just don’t claim “I want to be worth $10M… here is a question on a 10% wage change of $20K a year”. Decide what you want to do with your life and take it seriously, you don’t have that much time.

Don’t Expect Utopia in the End

A ton of you will make it. You have seen several people make it publicly in the jungle. Have you noticed? Not a single one of them is living in a utopia?

If you are 20 or 70, there is always going to be some sort of problem for you to solve. Just get used to it.

The goal is to limit the surface area of attack.

Bonus Note

For those that are curious, where do you think we are in the emotional cycle of life? Seems clear to us that we’re on the typical downtrend to peak despair/fear. WW3 + AI doomer + youth unemployment = getting near peak concerns.

What we do we know though, just homeless in a tent

We’ll be around through 2035, because we know how this all ends. Losing momentum is a big no for us. Will keep the pedal to the floor

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

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