Part 1: How People Get Trapped

Too Many Options: If you are willing to take some risk or work long hours you’re going to get to $1M by default nowadays. This side of the internet is not working minimum wage. Majority work in some high paid position (Wall St, Sales, Tech etc). Their goal is to actually make it. Making it requires a paid off home and around $4M liquid (squabbling over exactly $3-5M being the liquid part misses the point)

The reason why our audience has moved to this framework? It really isn’t hard to get to $1M as a high performer or hard worker.

Entry Level Tech, Wall Street and Sales all roughly

Make about the same. No need to argue over $10,000-$20,000 that will be a rounding error for you in a decade. The majority will make about $15K pre-tax a month or about $180,000. Some years better, some years worse but that’s about right.

If you start here and do anything on the side, we’ve never seen someone fail to come up with an extra $40-60K (you could even flip stuff on e-bay to collect $40K). That’s already landing you at ~$220,000-$230,000 a year. A smart investor/saver etc is going to put away 30% or so.

$65K a year for a decade is already over $1M. This assumes no wage growth, no business growth, no nothing. You’re 31 and already a millionaire, woo!

Reality sets in: Around this time frame most wake up a little bit behind the 8-ball. They wake up and say “wait a minute none of my bosses seems happy or rich”. If you put the $1M to work, realistically about $400K will be eaten into a down payment and $600K is left to invest (this is how high cost of living areas work, blah blah live in Idaho blah blah, reality is that the high paid positions are all in expensive areas where $2M for a house is pretty normal). This does not look like generational wealth or F-you money any time soon. In fact you don’t change your life at all and simply pay a bit more into mortgage which offsets all the salary increase over the past 10 years.

In simple terms, your annual spending on housing as a percent of income doesn’t change

Can’t make that more clear. While you are richer on paper, the cash outlay on housing is still no different so you don’t “feel rich”.

Most people try to double or triple down on a career. The problem is that the company knows you’re stuck so the annual wage/salary/bonus/total compensation ***percentage*** increase is much much lower.

You start running the math. Since you have a mortgage + likely starting a family, you’re not going to save more than 10-20%. Which means you’ve got until 60. This assumes you don’t have any catastrophic events: 1) health issue, 2) industry job loss, 3) sudden change in management and 4) a wide range of low probability events from a industry depression to new tech making your sector obsolete. Since you are trying to survive for 30 years all those “2-3% chance items become extremely probable to happen once. It’s basically a coin flip since 98% not happening for 30 straight years is 54.5%.

While Your Income Went up, Your Monthly burn on housing went to $10,467. Just for the Mortgage on a $2M home in a HCOL Area where all the high paying careers are.

Part 2: What Happens Next

Now we enter into two phases: 1) the complacency phase or 2) the realization phase - somewhat covered above.

Complacency Phase

If this is you, you’re in for an extremely rough life. Everyone around you says “you’re a millionaire so you’re fine”. Reality is that those high paying careers can go to zero. Not -90% not -50% but a flat out zero.

If you don’t think this is true, go look up old managing directors on Wall Street. You’ll see a litany of them going into “consulting” for 1-2 years. Then suddenly they are in a random corporate gig that pays $250K. This is a -66%+ down-draw and doesn’t include the 2-years of coping while being unemployed.

This is extremely serious. If you get complacent you’re risking everything. Your career. Your livelihood. And. Your family if you have one (majority of well off people will end up having kids)

What Typically Happens: Usually it is about 7-8 years of a good run. You’re clearing $500K to $800K. The problem is that those years also require the largest and most outrageous spending increases: 1) mortgage, 2) child care, 3) child development items - school, sports, music lessons and 4) general quality of life increases such as better food, nicer gym etc.

As long as income is up, this seems fine. Until you look around and see a graveyard of people who get cut and do the standard -66%.

The majortiy of people who get BBQ chicken cooked think “Okay i just throw $1M into the S&P and i’m fine”. This is only true if your income is stable. If you have no earnings for even two years… where is the money going to come from? The complacent people didn’t adjust for the risk of income loss.

• You spent about 10-15 years climbing

• Try to harvest the $500-800K a year income during the bigger earnings year

• The average tenure nowadays is probably around 7 years and that is while your expenses have ballooned

• If you get cut, you’re going -50-75% into a $340K Corp Dev Role. At this point you’re treading water

When Cut you don’t jump to the high-end. You end up somewhere around VP wiith around $338K in income (just using the median)

Autist Note: We’re well aware the exact calculation of the decline isn’t perfect. This is nitpicky and misses the point. If you had a huge year making $1M, maybe the decline is 70%. If you were making $500K maybe the decline is only 40%. The big picture is this. If you lose ~50% net income how exactly are you going to save to get ahead?

Realization Phase

The smart people realize that this was an inevitable situation. Instead of trying to impress every single person up the chain, they just do the minimum to be a top well liked person. If 5 people are up for promotion they land at #3-4. Make sure that the promotion is guaranteed, nothing more.

This requires significant ego management. You have to be cheering on the guy who got ranked #1. He will constantly give you passive aggressive remarks that he is better than you. Simply accept it and actually encourage it. “Yeah you’re just gifted at this i can’t roll like that”.

He doesn’t need to know that you’re building an escape via WiFi money on the side because the math doesn’t work. Every $20K extra bonus he gets is a whopping $10-12K after taxes. If you earn a meaningless $50K per year from a wifi biz, at a 4x multiple that is $200,000 on top of the $50K you’re throwing into the bank.

Most Start too Late: You’ve watched as numerous jungle members have scaled to 7-figure businesses. If you notice a trend? They don’t announce they are quitting until they are well beyond 2x W-2 net income from WiFi Biz. In fact, the common comment is always the same “woah it got that big!”. That is literally how it works. Anyone smart is still shipping in the minimum to get that decent bonus check, they just keep the WiFi hustle on the side to themselves.

Hint: If you know a person who is seen as strange but gets promoted “just barely” and isn’t giving it his all… that guy is the person who ends up quitting and B-lines it to 8-figures or more. Copy his strategy.

Part 3: Add It All Up - Why It is So Hard to Get to $4M TODAY

No matter which position you’re in (working and complacent) or WiFi biz secretly grinding, you know that math is not on your side.

If you put $1M into safe stuff and get 7% for 20 years. You end up with $4M. The problem is that 20 years from now it is only worth $2M!

3.5% inflation for 20 years means your money/purchasing power is cut in half.

Both Realize This: The wild part is that both parties in the complacency and realization phase mathematically understand this. Even if they came up with $100K extra per year, it is not going to to be easy to get to $4M. This sounds insane but if you look deeply into the numbers it makes sense. Mortgage is huge, kids likely costing $50-100K pre-tax etc. You no longer want to drive a 10 year old toyota. Eating ramen noodles isn’t exactly a thing anymore.

The complacent party says: “Ahh well i won’t get rich but i’ll be fine in retirement and living well”. Which is dangerous because there is <25% shot they keep the income for 30 years.

The realization party says “Ahh well i MIGHT not get rich but at least i have a shot and if i lose my job i’m still fine”. The belief system is massively different. Massively. One group is assuming the status quo. The second group is assuming the worst but buying hope for the future. If you know anything about lady luck, she rewards the people who take calculated risk. We all know how this ends.

Realization party has two outcomes: 1) some good luck/grit/effort they hit 8-figures plus and are beyond their wildest dreams, 2) they have everything go wrong and they are still living the same quality of life they had when in the grind W-2

Complacent party has two outcomes: 1) they do survive and keep their current style, 2) they get BTFO and suddenly their quality of life falls off a massive cliff.

Investing Also Gets Complicated

Beyond this, the complacent group is operating from a scarcity/fear belief system. The realization group is operating from a working capital perspective because they actually have another option.

If you need the money to compound forever, you can’t really buy anything beyond the S&P and safer investments

If you have a business you need the money to buy inventory and buy ads. These have a stated ROI of at least 20-30%. Therefore, your only investing is really the money you don’t need to grow

If you’ve never tried to build anything on your own the prior paragraph sounds absurd. If you’ve built a business a light bulb is going off in your head and a five alarm fire drill “oh so that’s why i started looking at asymmetric risk assets…”

Psychologically The Trap is Basically Set: Group 1 is relegated to low risk stuff. They can’t afford an error. Group 2 knows that no matter what they will be able to cover the bills.

This means group 2 is attracting luck by default. They can consider new projects and the risk is mitigated by the multiple income streams.

• $1M net assets, go to zero on income? You’re burning it within 5-7 years

• $1M net assets, go to zero on two incomes? You’re burning zero of it within 5-7 years

Part 4: Where it Gets Ultra Complicated

The above is for around 95% of you. The majority of you are making less than you are worth because that is why you were hired in the first place. Would you hire someone who loses you money? Yeah of course not.

There is a small 5% sub-set though “the super employees”. These people earn outrageous sums of money. We’ll draw a rough line at $1.5M. If this is you, this is no different than having two income streams. If you have a choice between $500K W-2 and $300K WiFi money or…. $1.5M straight and no WiFi… You should take the $1.5M. You can make it work. You sleep in a cheap place, live WAY under your means and you can put away $2M in two years. Now you’ve got $3M and you’ll be at $4M in ~4 years.

This is the exception to the rule. If you are the exception to the rule you already know it. The exception to the rule doesn’t need to ask. A professional athlete earning $5M a year with a $5M/year guarantee for 5-years… is not asking about WiFi money. The guy making $250K-600K is 100% asking about WiFi money.

In short, if you’re asking if you should start a business the answer is YES AND YESTERDAY YOU’VE ALREADY LOST A DAY.

$4M Is the New $1M

Back in 1990 $1M was fine. At 5% you were getting $50,000. That was worth 45% of a house. Today? $4M at 5% is $200K. This is hilariously about 48% of a house. Close enough.

What Will it Buy: Before we get flamed on X/Twitter, ask yourself what $200K buys? You’ll realize it buys exactly the same amount of stuff from 1990. We’re actually being generous because $50K used to buy 66.75 shares of S&P 500 now $200K only buys 26 units.

$4M is the new $1M. Figure out how to get there, do it as fast as you can.

Good luck anon!

We’ll be building wifi businesses, investing in tech and shipping into cryptographically digital assets over the long-term. We’ll see everyone on the other side!

Apologize for more typos/grammar errors than usual, got stuck at an airport but wanted to explain this ASAP!

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)

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In reality, the cash balance is kept as low as possible. While the wealthy have $100,000+ in bank accounts, you have to look at it as a percentage of wealth. If you are a billionaire and have eight bank accounts with $250,000 in it… is that a lot of money? It is only 0.2% of the wealth. Not a lot.

What do they do instead? They try to decouple their time from money. While you can’t start a new federal reserve and print money, the concept of a “business” is actually quite simple. You need to get more money out of it than you put in.

Part 1: How to Decouple Time and Money

Before anyone gets offended, we loosened up our stance on this over the past 5-10 years. A lot of people will start in a time for money exchange. It’s actually completely fine to do this. If your first whiff of making money for yourself requires you to exchange time for money on some internet platform, so be it. Just know that the long-term goal is to remove that set up. It’s entirely fine to sell your time for $50 to $100 an hour on the internet if it is day one. If you plan on getting rich, you cannot exchange your time for money 10, 15 or 20 years from now.

Money Printer is simple. Put $10 in, get >$10 after.

We gave out a simple example years ago. Every single biz person got the answer correct.

• You run an ad with a guaranteed net profit after all costs + taxes of 1 cent (per dollar)

• You can put infinite money into it and you will receive the one cent per dollar in 24 hours

• How much should you spend?

• Answer in this fake situation is every single dollar you have at all times.

In the real world spending $100 to get $1 is not sustainable. You would run out of customers quickly, you would likely lose money after a small part of the TAM was saturated. The concept is what matters.

If you can find any system where $1 enter = more than $1 out, that is a great business since you don’t lose any time at all.

How Do I Remove Myself

In the corporate world, a lot of the game is taking on more responsibility and more workload to be noticed. This sounds good until you realize that it is not scalable. Once you flip the switch to running a business, you are constantly asking “how do i remove myself”

If you don’t do anything but generate money, that i an incredible business. This is also why people obsess over investing. They want to make money without having to do any actual leg work

• Stocks they are getting part of the earnings without working for the company

• Rental units = they want someone else to manage it and collect part of the profit while sitting at home

• Running a business is generating income while you are asleep

• Intellectual property/royalties = making money without being physically present

Once you see it like this, everything should start to click. Anything you’re building needs to have two things: 1) it needs to earn money if you invest money into it and 2) it needs to run without your presence in the long-term

How Most People Get Trapped

The majority don’t put all of this together. They typically spend their entire life reliant on a time for money exchange. This isn’t scalable because your time is finite. No matter what you do, you cannot create more hours in a day. It should look more like this:

• Beginning taking money and shoveling it into a scalable business

• Eventually scalable business makes real money

• You stay and help it grow working absurd hours (typically 3 years) and eat glass for breakfast, lunch and dinner

• Few years pass you realize you have a lot more money than you expected (overshot)

• You start delegating work to other people

• You realize you should have delegated earlier, sit back and focus on redoing the process with less hours entirely on your shoulders (second, third, fourth or fifth biz)

The above is extremely rare. Usually what happens is people only see the end points.

• Poor/lower class = take all money and just consume

• Middle = Take all money, consume and leave 5-10% for retirement/savings

• Wealthy = “Doing nothing” and generate large spending power. (No one sees the using labor to build an asset part).

Once again, if you’re not rich yet, the goal is simple. “How much time am I spending building an asset I own?” Really critical question. You’re building your own money printer, or you’re helping build someone else’s money printer. Better make sure you’re doing more for yourself over the long-run.

Good Example Here

What this post actually misses is that the banker is doing it wrong. All the hours are spent building someone else’s dreams. If someone can get promoted quickly and survive the absolute grind and brutality of Wall Street, they can make it in the biz world. Problem is that they end up becoming ultra risk averse due to the pain of losing the high paying W-2.

Part 2: Wealthy People Target Ownership and Control

Most people see this and ignore the last part. If you take all your money and only invest in various mega cap stocks, how much of the company will you actually own? The answer is “a minuscule amount”

Wealth and wealth creation is always relative. This is why humans are designed with deep envy and comparisons. If everyone gets 5% richer tomorrow, the only thing that happens is a price increase of 5%. We saw this during COVID. If prices go up 20% but you’re up 200%…. You’re blowing past everyone.

How to Target Ownership and Control

Since the path to wealth starts with ownership and control there are two viable options: 1) you’re born rich and you get a huge head start with $1M in diversified stocks and a paid off condo in Miami and 2) you have to create ownership by owning 100% of something you’re building and either keep it for the income or sell it at a multiple.

Since you’re reading this website, we’re going to wager there is a 99% chance you’re in group two.

• Step 1: Build your first asset. This is by far the hardest. People refuse to try. The system is set up to make you quit. You won’t make real money for ~3 years. This is the case for the vast majority. If you wait and start tomorrow instead of today, the opportunity cost just goes up. If you start a 40 your opportunity cost is hundreds of thousands, if you start at 21 your opportunity cost is your entry level base salary. Hard to be motivated if your first E-com sale is a $500 profit month and you earn $400,000+ per year

• Step 2: You realize that a dollar made in your own business is worth MULTIPLES. If your income goes up $10,000, that is it. If your business income goes up $10,000 but the industry trades at a 5x P/E you amde $10,000 + the new valuation improvement of $50,000. Not even remotely close to the same (oh and you own 100% of that increase)

  No matter how hard you work you can never sell your job/career at 10x

• Step 3: Every single sector/market grows and matures. By the time you have scaled up your company, you will learn that you’re generating far more income than you can spend. We’ll say that again. By the time you have hit your groove, you’re generating far more money than you can spend. This means that you don’t even know what product to launch since there is no obvious “next new”

• Step 4: Instead of sitting on cash going down with inflation, you end up buying a wide variety of assets: crypto, stocks, real estate, private businesses etc. This is simply a version of you becoming a partial owner of something else. Since you’re a partial owner, you know that the person who owns the majority will become excessively wealthier than you even if you are right about the investment.

• Step 5: You realize the only way to generate more wealth is by going back to step 1. The assets you own are simply placeholders until you find something better to do with it

If you internalize all of this, the way rich people think begins to make sense.

• They don’t view primary homes as part of net worth because it doesn’t generate any income for them. They also have to buy another if they leave. It’s largely a lifestyle choice (right place they want to live long-term) and reduces long-term costs

• As soon as they have excess money, they ship it straight into assets. Not going to battle here and simply say “any asset that appreciates long term”

• They hate the idea of money earning nothing. They will always have a low percentage of wealth in cash

• Unless they are extremely bored, the chances of ever exchanging time for money is slim

Then It Simply Snowballs

Once this process is run a few times, the income generated from investments > your annual spending.

We know that $10M is peanuts on X app but look at the rough numbers.

If you had half of that ($5M)) and that generated $250,000 it means you would spend $20,000+ a month. Chance are slim you’re consistently burning through this money for 99% of the population.

Said differently, you don’t need cash because the cash gets rebuilt by the end of the month anyway!

For most people, they have about three income streams: 1) main biz that is 80% of their earnings, 2) second biz that is about 15% and then 3) the investment return/asset appreciation that is the remaining 5%. If you look at it from that lens you can see why cash isn’t something they hold. They money they earn from dividends, interest and capital gains already exceeds their spending

Part 3: Audit Your Life

Most millionaires are first generation. There is a lot of cope and seethe around this comment but the statistics back it up.

In fact, if someone argues that this isn’t possible they are already showcasing qualities that will make them unsuccessful. Smart (future millionaires) ask “how did they do it” instead of trying to fight the reality (that America is the easiest place on earth to get rich)

Here Our Own Audit List Unrelated to Your Background

• Are you doing what you are good at? If you can’t answer what you’re good at, this is already a natural disaster level emergency. You should not care if you enjoy the task. Ask what you are good at, find something that pays the most for the task and start there.

  • If you are not doing what you are good/talented at, you do not deserve anything. You’re depriving the world of your natural calling. This is like a 7’0” 300 lb man with a 50” vertical deciding to become a horse jockey because he likes horses. Good luck

• How are your priorities? You have a thin window of time to take extreme risk and burn the candle on both ends. As long as health is good enough, you should guard your time like Fort Knox. If it isn’t helping you build ownership/equity, it isn’t worth it.

• How High is Your Self Awareness? “Make your weakness a strength”. Yep. You guessed it. More nonsense. Some of you are new, some of you are long-term readers. Would any of you come to us for “emotional support?” Exactly. Something we don’t have and gave up on years ago. If you’re not great at something just move on. You can improve the level to where it is socially functional and simply move on

• How Are Your Friends? Are they all on the same page? Be honest about it. Much like high school when there is a big split after graduation an even bigger split happens in 20s and 30s. It’s easy to forecast once you think about it. Would someone who lives in a Beverly Hills mansion have constant contact with someone who lives in a studio in New Mexico? Highly unlikely to have any significant consistent contact. The cliche of your five contacts highlighting who you are is true

• Do You Keep Contact With Winners? Once again, be honest about it. If you’re the jealous type or big ego type you’ll see the problem in this question. How will you create a good list of contacts if every successful friend you have is hit with “must be nice”, “you got lucky” or “you changed man”.

None of these questions are remotely related to “knowing the right people”. If you’re grinding and building stuff you will meet successful people along the way. The probabilities are in your favor as proven in this book.

Just up to you to believe in the laws of mathematics!

Summary

Hopefully this post will resonate and be taken seriously. If you’re living up to your max effort + focusing on ownership/control, the math says you’re going to get there. The problem is priorities, consistency and conviction.

Besides, it’s not like you have another choice. Your boss is not going to hand you a 100% raise. You’ll probably underperform inflation long-term.

Your boss is hoping to move 1% of your raise into his pocket! He’d do your job if he could take your salary (that’s how corporate is, they prefer more work in exchange for time!)

On that note, back to the tent.

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

One request we got is “what is the narrative” to explain a future dip. We have no idea what the exact one will be (assuming t…

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But first an update on what is changing.

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Recent Blowup in the Hedge Fund World

Risk is something that people think about when it is typically too late. Even Citadel almost went under in 2008 due to severity of the financial crisis. Therefore, it can happen to anyone and your age also determines what type of risks are reasonable.

• Young People: Negligible risk when it comes to money. Unless born as a trust fund baby, the chances are high that going to zero (losing $50K) isn’t going to change your life. It would hurt but it wouldn’t be a life altering event despite all the propaganda given to kids for life (never take risk, always play it safe etc.)

• Middle Age: It gets difficult around here. You have enough information to be dangerous but the stakes are higher. If you’re financially successful, you have to find a way to grow (beat inflation) while removing the potential to go to zero

• Older Age: Actually a lot easier here, there is no real point to taking risk anymore. It has to be low cost and high upside. A pretty rare combination as you’re likely living off the cash flow machine you built by this point

Part 1: Shannon’s Demon/Gamblers Ruin

If you make all your decisions based on expected value, chances are extremely high that you’ll end up broke. This confuses people at first because school teaches everyone to just look at Expected Value.

Here is a simple example of an investment outcome in “Stock A”

• It goes up 7% with a 95% probability

• It goes down 95% with a 5% probability

• Expected value = (7%*95%) + (-95%*5%) = 1.9%

Based on simple math most people would say this is a good game to play. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. If you were to continuously play this game, you’d go broke.

If you used $100 and won 20 times in a row, you’d have $386.97. Then the next hit is negative and you’re down to $19.35. Despite winning for 20 straight years you have 1/5th of the money and you’ve lost all of your time as well.

The point here is pretty simple, you need to find investments where you’re still in the game. This one might be useful for a small portion of the book but you shouldn’t be all in due to the blow up risk.

Simplified Even More

Since these high level phrases like Shannon’s Demon/Gamblers Ruin are hard to remember it is a lot easier to think about it like this:

• You should hate an investment more as it goes up

• You should like an investment more as it goes down

This is entirely counterintuitive. It’s also why retail has terrible returns. If you’re on social media consistently you can quite literally see the emotions develop. As soon as something is consensus it becomes a terrible buy/sell at that point in time.

Various versions of this can be found across a wide range of time frames

You can actually do this yourself. Go and find the current top 3 trending sectors/stocks etc. See what the most common comment is. Reverse it and that’s probably going to be right some 75% of the time.

Part 2: What to Do About it

This side of the web is basically focused on finding asymmetric opportunities. This is where your upside is substantial and your downside is typically in the -50-60% range (big difference from -95%). The way to find these set ups? You need a clean and congruent view of the next 10-20 years or so.

If you have no long-term view of where the world is heading you’ll constantly invest into assets that have more downside than you thought. This is actually proven out by Morgan Stanley which shows that ~54% of stocks never recover to par after a large ~80-85% drawdown.

In addition to that the study shows that “60 percent of the sample failed to match the returns of Treasury bills, destroying $10.1 trillion in value through December 2024. The other 40 percent or so created $89.5 trillion in value. Just 2 percent of the companies produced 90 percent of the aggregate wealth creation of $79.4 trillion, and the top 6 (Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, and ExxonMobil) alone added $17.1 trillion”

Source

First World View

Decide what is going to drive all the value in the future. Is oil going to suddenly become a new industry? How about financial services? How about restaurants? As you can see, the chances of saying yes to any of those is extremely slim. There is always going to be a new popular apparel brand or food chain. However. Compare that to the number of new restaurants and you’ll see an uglier number

More likely case? People will use more technology, drive operational costs down with software/AI and spend 90%+ of their time staring at some sort of screen (computer, smartphone, VR/AR, etc.)

This alone is going to help you avoid concentrated investments in the wrong sectors. If you simply follow what is hot, you might have gotten burned on legalized marijuana which was a long-term commodity product with no defensible moat.

Go Within Tech

Once you’ve solved the general world view you have to go within tech and decide which assets you’re going to be exposed to. You can buy things like crypto, semis and FAANG but you can’t invest in just “one” of those big three. You have to own separate assets within it otherwise you’re not going to be able to hold on when it inevitably goes down 50-60% in a down year.

A Better Book: BTC, ETH, NVDA, SMH, GOOGL, AMZN, TSLA and AAPL. Beyond that you have cash/indexes. This set up has a high tilt to technology but doesn’t have you exposed to only one. If you do it early enough, what happens? One of them goes up a bunch and ends up being a much higher concentration (just how the math works)

A Bad Book: You only own QQQ and SPY. In this case you’re going to be exposed to tech and the broad based market. However, you’re not able to generate any real outperformance. In this case, you better be in middle age to late age because it’s not going to make you rich.

The exception? You recently had a huge amount of business success. In that case you might be diversifying because the equity in your WiFi biz is 5-10x more valuable than all your investments.

Create Different Ways to Win

The world view you have is going to determine all of your success over the next 20 years.

Hate to be that dramatic about it. Just what we’ve seen.

If you don’t have conviction in a world view it will be difficult/impossible to make it. New industries become hot every 3-5 years, old industries make come backs and anything trending on CNBC/Socials is typically the beginning/end of the sub-sector (if it’s a disaster it’s the bottom, if its excitement likely the top from a price perspective).

Concentration > Leverage: Since the majority of our readers are not in retirement age, the right balance is to think “concentration over leverage”. You need concentration to get rich. No one is going to get rich by skipping coffee and investing $10 a month into index funds.

Leverage is different as you can be right and still lose it all. If you had 2x leverage in Bitcoin in 2017, you would have been wiped out in the 2018 bear market. The same can be said of every single fast moving sector. Leopold just got blown out with leverage and he was the golden child of the AI/memory trade. Anyone who simply owned spot since 2021 or so is up millions + stress free.

Good Framework: One we’ve seen work is pretty simple: 1) W-2 paycheck is the funding mechanism, 2) most important first funnel is to your Wi-Fi biz - testing demand building skills until one works - source, 3) your left over money is going to be the 100% match in your company 401K and an investment portfolio.

That’s as simple as it gets. With that flow of funds it’ll be hard to lose. The problem is that most take #1, spend it all (or worse) and then take left over money (if there is anything) and try to buy grand slam home run stocks all the time (the grand slam is actually in your control - your own WiFi/E-com biz).

Summary

If you don’t have a systematic way to invest and a world view, we’d say your chances of getting wealthy are actually quite low. If you call a wealth management firm (larp as a potential client) you can gather the following quickly: 1) people run small businesses, 2) the people who got large sums from investing were practically all tech related and 3) they all had conviction and more importantly could hold onto that position. The last part is what is covered in this post and is heavily ignored during an uptrend (what we’ve seen in general stocks this year). Leverage isn’t needed to get rich, it just takes the headlines.

Part 3: When to Exit Concentration

There are really two times to exit: 1) you hit your numbers and 2) you see everyone in your social circle talking about the asset. Either one of these is a good reason to pack up for a while and look elsewhere.

Numbers: We’ve said that around 99% of people will be fine with a paid off home and $3-5M liquid. At this level we’d say the move is simple “diverisfy and invest all your earned income aggressively”. This is the right balance because you’re going to work for the rest of your life. We don’t know a single successful person who decided to do nothing. Those gap years become boring by month 6. Feel free to take time off, but, we all know you’ll be doing something after.

Put that money away, $3-5M in diversified boring stuff, every single cent you make after? Shipped into risk/asymmetric investments. VC type investors have been doing this for decades now.

Note: If you’re worried about inflation, you would simply double it in 20 years. In 2046, the same lifestyle is likely going to require a paid off home and $6-10M. We’re assuming a 3.5% inflation rate since nice areas typically go up slightly more than inflation at all times.

Everyone is Getting Rich: If you see this phrase in your circles, it’s time to run. If you’re investing in say 5 sectors, it’ll happen to at least one of them every 2-3 years or so. It means you cut that position significantly (take out principal at minimum). That’ll allow you to survive the inevitable -50% that’ll come sooner than expected.

The odd part about this is that most will buy the second move up. They get addicted to the fast gains and don’t have the patience to wait out a meaningless 6-12 months. If you know that everyone is “getting rich” and you can see more and more selling of the stock/crypto, it’s time to avoid ruin. Having a $1M go to $500K vs. having it go to $750K is an outrageous difference. The first one feels like you wasted your time, the second one hurts but you’re too busy building positions in other sectors to notice.

Final Notes

This is meant to be high level and will hopefully help you develop your own internal tracker and model.

You should be using more social/emotional signals and drop your reliance on various valuation metrics.

Simple Example of Anomaly Herd Interest Spike

In addition, you should have no ruin risk. People say that starting a business is potential ruin. It is not. If you build it using your W-2 income, you’re simply double dipping.

Ruin risk is a 100% concentration into something you have no control over.

With a W-2 to WiFi to Investing flow chart, it is difficult to go to zero without leverage.

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

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If you do not hit the initial conversions on your first ever add, but are off by say 20%, that’s actually good. It means your next iteration will be closer to industry and your third is most likely going to hit it (rough example).

If you have been doing ads for 10+ years and you are 20%+ off with no idea what went wrong? Then you know you’re cooked and best to go to a different product. As always, making ads/making money/running a biz is no different than playing a sport. Don’t make your first day compare to a vet. Don’t get delusional if you’re a vet and things are way off.

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Intro

I'll keep the intro brief. I'm Matt (Kobra). Sports medicine background. I wrote a guest post here back in July 2024 about the pre-sale launch of Morning Would. This one is about the other business, the one that got me out of the W2 entirely.

Fifteen dollars

November 2022. I was out with my family doing some Christmas thing with decorations and lights at a local farm with the kid. Someone paid me $15 for a groin rehab protocol I threw together while I was pushing the stroller to the ticket booth.

Fifteen dollars. I've made a lot more since. Nothing has hit like that notification. A complete stranger on the internet paid me for something I knew. I still remember exactly where I was standing. I would argue that that $15 was likely a top 5 most important thing to happen to me ever.

At that point I had a hospital job, one toddler, and no clue what I was doing

Rewind to 2021

I had a good job on paper. Sports medicine program in a hospital system, good benefits, stable - until Covid.

Then the vaccine mandates rolled through a year after forced furloughs and I learned that a stable W2 is stable right up until someone above you decides it isn't. It came down to a 2nd round of appeals to end up with an exemption or I was getting fired. Ended up being the only person in my department to get one.

I “won” but I knew I had to get out. At that point I made a decision that nobody would ever again have the power to impact my ability to provide for my family.

I made an anon BowTied account because the jungle was the only place I saw people actually building exits and I wanted a part. And I couldn't exactly have a public side business while working.

I knew nothing about emails or offers or funnels. I was good at literally one thing. People get hurt and have pain and I was pretty good at getting them out of it. If you read the Morning Would post you already know ecom wasn't in there either. Then I sat on the account for the better part of a year doing nothing with it.

I became a consultant by accident

I never planned to consult or work with people virtually. Coming from my world that didn’t even exist as an option.

I genuinely didn’t even know what a consult was at the time. I just posted about rehab because it was the only subject where I was somewhat of an expert. Hurt people started showing up in my DMs. Eventually people asked if I did consults, I said yes, then went and figured out how to actually do that.

At some point in 2023 a professional soccer player in Europe with turf toe DMed me. He had run out of options and somehow his last resort was a cartoon snake. We got him back on the field and it kind of went from there.

Jan 2024, the mortgage

About 15 months after that first $15, the side business paid my mortgage for the first time. And then it happened again. Rehab money from strangers on the internet covered my biggest bill.

That’s when something got rewired and I realized I could actually make it out on some unofficial timeline. That January was when I stopped treating it like a hobby that made money and started treating it like the thing I was building my exit on and went fully in.

Meanwhile, the beaver

All of this was happening while HTD and I were building Morning Would on nights and weekends with what little time we already had. That full story is in the July 2024 post so I won't mention much more:

The update since then: 7 figure revenue in our first full year from launch and still growing fast. We still have not taken a single investment penny.

Aug 2024, going to work started losing me money

In August 2024 the side income for the first time was a 2x my monthly W2 salary. That was the first time it had even matched it. The next several months were in the ballpark of my salary or a little more. But it matched it the remainder of that year.

That did something to my head. I was making more from the side business than from the hospital. Every shift at the hospital was time pulled away from something that scaled. Meanwhile my merit increases couldn’t even keep up with inflation. Why would I bust my balls to exceed expectations to get 5% when I could coast and get 3% but funnel more time to what mattered?

Going to work was actually losing me money. Strange realization when you've spent your whole adult life treating the paycheck as safe and always trying to be the good employee.

I quit about 6 months before I quit

I'd already made the decision in July 2025.

In my head I was gone. I stayed anyway because we were expecting our third kid, and hospital insurance meant that baby arrived essentially free. I definitely played the benefits game and milked every last thing I possibly could on the way out. Bull has said it before. But it’s truly insane how much you can get away with by mailing it in and doing the bare minimum.

I used to feel guilty about things like that. Then I remembered they would have fired me over not getting a shot. So I rode it out, we had the kid, and I left shortly after with the consulting business running at 4x my old W2. Those last months were odd.

Sitting in a job I'd already left in my mind, watching the side income keep growing, pretending to do enough to not get fired, waiting on a due date.

The kids part

I did all of this with kids. One 2 year old when I started, a second right as I started to figure out the wifi money, then a third right as things began to scale quick. Two rounds of newborn sleep while holding down the W2 and 2 businesses. The eyebags are permanent at this point.

Work happened wherever it fit. Lot of sleepless nights, early mornings, giving up on weekends, calling in sick on work zooms to onboard clients.

On going semi anon

I was BT Kobra for years. Only recently did the slight rebrand to Matt, Kobra Sports Med. At some point it’s hard to grow a consulting business when people have no idea who I am. It’s actually insane people used to hire me after a Google Meet call with just a black screen.

I was anon as long as necessary while building on the side of the W2. About a year before I left the W2, clients started seeing my face. That was the point where the black screen was costing me more business than the hospital finding out would have cost me.

Thanks again

All in all I went from essentially 0 to being able to exit my W2 in about 2.5 years. For the record this is and was by no means easy. Juggling and scaling 2 businesses with a W2 and 3 kids is by far the hardest thing I have ever done by far. None of it happens without making that account and a $10/mo Substack subscription. Not the consulting, not Morning Would, not the exit.

Thanks to Bull and everyone in the jungle who answered my dumb questions along the way. If you wanna follow me on X, kobrasportsmed.

If you wanna check out Morning Would, head over to getmorningwould.shop

BTB Notes By Us

There are a lot of interesting things here if you read between the lines:

1. Not only did he escape the W-2 he did so while already having kids/juggling a pregnancy

2. In addition, he did BOTH wifi money and the side business of consulting. You have no clue which one scales first but in a wild set up both did well. This is rare, usually one hits one doesn’t but doing 2 at once and both successful is quite an accomplishment

3. Matt realized the same thing we did years ago, if you just mail it in and do the minimum, you still get decent raises and don’t even get fired. It makes no sense to give it 110% when you can make 2, 3, 4, 5x what you make at W-2 by yourself as either a supplement biz (MorningWould), consultant or other SaaS/E-com

4. His weird vibe the last 6 months tracks. We’re guessing it was health care related and some benefits. You just end up biding your time and collecting. This is how it feels when you are truly checked out

5. He did it ultra conservative, most wait for 2x but he did a 4x. Pretty insane considering MorningWould was also doing 7 figures in revs. Goes to show how much your risk tolerance drops after becoming a parent!

That’s the main jist.

If you plan on quitting the W-2, our next post on Wednesday is going to be related to E-com.

You’ll learn exactly how to test demand, what good metrics are: Conversion rates, AOV, META ROAS, GOOGL ROAS, Gross Margin and Net Margin

This way you can test your ideas for a whopping $5K and once you find one that hits, you’ll likely be in the same shoes at Matt soon enough.

As always, Equal Opportunity, Unequal Results

Stay Toon’d

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 do not have the time to look at every single product, every single ad and every single sub-sector. It’ll be a simple guide on the following: Conversion rates, AOV, META ROAS, GOOGL ROAS, Gross Margin and Net Margin. This will be set up by major sector (nine in total).

Since we’ve beaten the dead horse on how to find ideas (and given out several every few months or so), this one will tie the loose end on testing demand. If we hear any demand test question it’ll likely just get a link because the industries don’t change dramatically (outside of recessions and COVID like environments).

Now onto the Topic of the Day Attempting to Front Run!

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Per usual, will focus much more on the Q&A as the post is short and summary format. If you have specific life related investing questions please provide your general goal + how stable your income is. We don’t need absurd details to provide an opinion but a person with $10M making $1M a year guaranteed is very different from someone with $1M making $1M a year in an ultra high risk industry.

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If you think about it, it’s actually smarter to see what is outperforming right now. The smart money sold their AI/Semi stocks in June or so and they need to put that to work now and through year end. Isn’t it better to figure out where they are going instead of obsessing with headlines? That’s simply how we think over here.

Part 1: The Money Has to Go Somewhere

We have no idea what it means when people say “cash on the sidelines”. If someone sells $1,000,000 worth of any stock in June, they would receive $1,000,000. However the $1,000,000 would come out of the account with the $1,000,000 in it.

Simplistically, if you sold $1M of stock to Bob, at the end of the day, your account would read $1M cash and his would read $1M worth of stock. No cash “left the sidelines”.

With that explained we can move to actual liquidation of “cash on the sidelines”.

When SpaceX went public, this actually took cash off the sidelines. Investable money went from $1M in a brokerage to $1M of new stock. The stock did not exist before. Instead of you sending $1M to Bob, you’re sending $1M to SPCX balance sheet to go spend money on rockets, satellites and other Musk ideas. (we’re not going to walk through all the costs of going public with banker fees etc, this simple explainer is more than enough)

This is the Money Ready for New Issuance of Stock (not stock currently trading)

Source

An easy way to remember this.

If you’re giving money to a company that is cash leaving the general brokerage account ecosystem. If you’re simply buying or selling a stock that is already trading, it just moves cash from one person to another and the stock/bond amount from one account to another.

Simple as that.

Upcoming Events to Take Cash

OpenAI/Anthropic: The main reason these companies want to get out before end of year is because of the potential risk for interest rate hikes. If rates go up significantly (or markets believe they will), the ability to attract this money simply goes down.

These are huge IPOs expected to be in the trillions of dollars. The raise alone would bring in tens/hundreds of billions out of cash accounts into brand new equity.

If you want a good example of risk appetite, these are the two to watch.

Other Potential ones are: Jersey Mikes, Shein, Discord and Strava. We’re sure we missed others but we’re really only focused on tech and the ones that matter are OpenAI and Anthropic.

If any of these major household names fail to raise, it means that institutional investors do not believe in the valuations of the sector. After SpaceX initial bump and fast decline to below IPO price, it’ll be incredibly clear where everyone stands (assuming either AI company can get out by end of year).

Summary

New issuance or stock offerings are where you actually see movement of cash on the sidelines. The rest of the standard trades you do on your brokerage account is just transferring cash from you to someone else and their stock to you (and vice versa).

Since we know some people were selling in June, we’d argue that watching the outperforming names from here is what will matter. After clicking the sell button, they have to look around and find something compelling to rebuy. Signal is currently firing but everyone is looking at the headline (per usual).

Part 2: Where the Money is Going

It isn’t really possible to follow every single individual stock movement. IE. You can’t figure out if the smart money sold Micron and rotated specifically to Coca-Cola or something like that. However, the indexes do tell you what happened directionally.

We know that 99% of people do not care about our comments on indexes. Just survive the next couple paragraphs and it should make sense.

Roughly Speaking NASDAQ topped out in June or so

However the Russell 2000 index is actually up since June

Now We Have a Decent Clue

If the NASDAQ started under performing in June due to weakness in mega cap, AI and Semis, that money had to rotate somewhere. We know that the Russell 2000 has a much broader index weight and is more representative of the “everything” index. Its weights are roughly as follows:

Source

Use some elimination:

• Financials? No chance, a tech seller is not buying bank stocks and they have underperformed vs market anyway

• Energy? Definitely a good year for it, that said, a tech investor can’t really buy it due to tech mandate

• Healthcare and Industrials? Ding ding! These are the two potential sectors driving better performance. What you see from this is healthcare didn’t outperform but… drum roll… industrials sure did by a wide margin and are oddly in-line with the rough performance of the Russell 2000

Click over and you’ll see the sector generally did better since June

Checks the Boxes: Oil explains part of the outperformance but the real rotation from Tech went into industrials. It also lines up with the mandate. You can argue that industrials are “technology in heavy machinery form”. Much easier spin vs. saying you invested into natural gas and oil.

Major holdings here are: Caterpillar, GE Vernova, GE Aerospace, RTX, Eaton and Boeing. In fact, we’d argue that the Space related sell off probably went a bit into here.

This means? The same people who sold in June (the tech stuff) believe Industrials are the best place to park money.

Autist Note: None of this is a guarantee. We’re not saying it’s guaranteed industrials go up. We’re not saying every dollar sold from SMH went in here, it’s just showcasing what actually happened in terms of sector rotation from a big picture perspective.

Part 3: Time to Follow the Fast Money

Now that the index concept is understood, we can now move out the risk curve and apply the same logic to Tech specifically. We know the following:

• SpaceX unlocks in Early August. People will sell to buy homes/other stocks. They will not sell every single share but there will be new sellers

• Anthropic and OpenAI intend to go public. They will watch what happens to the stock and the same dynamic plays out for 90 days

• This means you should care deeply about what SpaceX holders purchase after they exit. You cannot express that in a random home purchase but you can see the stock/crypto/bond/commodity preference from August to October

Ideal Set Up: In a perfect world (which doesn’t exist), you’ll see some tech pressure. You’ll see rate hike fears. You’ll get some SpaceX selling for employees and you’ll see sectors and individual stocks outperform on a relative basis. Once this happens, you have an extremely clear picture of what the Athropic/OpenAI employees will buy.

While it is never perfect, the type of stocks a SpaceX employee will buy is going to be quite similar to one that Anthropic/OpenAI employee would buy. They all work in tech, they all like to be on the edge, they are also pretty obsessed about net worth. This means their general preference will be similar or at minimum a high correlation well above 0.75.

From the above you can see that about half the shares will be out by end of September. This means by October end they should show you a clear picture of what they are buying/rotating into. That’s the likely signal and the remaining 50% is probably going to follow the similar structure/pattern (outside of Musk/Board shares that unlikely waver much).

Also. The preference is going to showcase what Anthropic/OpenAI employees would likely rotate into as well. We’ll let you guys figure out if that’s important or not!

On that note, hope this was informative/useful. Follow the smart money, don’t get caught looking at whatever the main headline is. Profit and move on.

We’ll be following the money quite closely. Since it is by far the most entertaining game available to us at this time!

Be sure to sign up and consider joining the paid side for a whopping Latte per month!

Stay Toon’d

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

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The entire post below is written by TJ unedited except grammar/format

Intro

If you’re selling things online you’ve undoubtedly had “creative volume” drilled into your head over the last year or so. And with good reason, Meta (in its current state) rewards high volume + high diversity.

If you’re a reader of this newsletter, your natural inclination in response to this is/was to leverage AI. Rightfully so. It is by and large the easiest way to achieve this.

Heck… we make AI creatives for The Outgoing Co every single day.

Source

This comes with some issues:

1. Distrust/brand damage - if you’ve run any AI creatives you know what I mean. You will get “ai slop” comments nonstop. The masses seem to be experiencing some AI fatigue.

2. Legality and compliance - the laws are still unclear and ever changing. Nothing kills momentum quite like an ad account ban (ask me how I know).

3. Oversaturation - There are just a lot of AI creatives out there right now.

The New Way

Enter the affiliate army. Old Basic Below.

Source

You may have heard this referred to as the “Hudson Method” popularized by Hudson Leogrande the founder of Comfrt - the #1 TikTok shop brand.

The reason it’s become so popular is simply that it’s incredibly effective (obviously).

The quick version of the method: Seed as many affiliates as humanly possible with product. Make them advocates of the brand. Take the best performers and treat them like employees. Train them and give them everything they need to make money and great creatives.

The below is a step by step on how we’ve implemented this with The Outgoing Co:

A few notes:

• I have hired a contractor to lead this effort but it is not required and can definitely be done solo

• You must be prepared to send out a LOT of product

• It works significantly better the more you’re spending on meta

Sorry for all the setup context - it was necessary

Now let’s get to it:

• We will be utilizing: Tiktok shop, Euka Ai, Trybe, Meta ads manager, and Amazon

  • Not all “required” but definitely needed to maximize this motion

  • If you are not on tiktok shop you can still use this method - just skip the the trybe + meta part

  • Amazon’s only place here is to capture the Halo effect from all of this

• Tiktok

  • Step 1 - Ensure you have TikTok Shop fully set up and ready to send samples to affiliates

  • Step 2 - will be to set up your Euka AI bot

    • For those unfamiliar, Euka is an AI platform that does affiliate outreach for TikTok Shop

    • Make sure you have separate bots for each SKU

    • You will be limited in your message limits at first if you’re not doing $50k+/month on TikTok Shop. That’s ok.

    • Send as many samples as possible when starting out.

  • Step 3 - Setup GMVmax (one campaign per sku) with an ROI setting of >1.0 so that it only spends when there are dollars to be had to minimize TikTok Shop losses (note: This is not a write-up about scaling on TikTok Shop)

  • Step 4 - Go through all of the affiliate submissions daily/weekly and scout for winners. Anyone with talent gets invited to join you on Trybe (next section)

• Trybe

  • If you’re unfamiliar, Trybe is an affiliate platform that allows you to: seed samples, collect video content, publish them as ads to Meta directly, and offer commissions to affiliates. Essentially, tiktok shop for meta.

    • If you want more information on the app or setup please go to Trybe directly - I am not affiliated in any way

  • As mentioned above, the best creators from tiktok will be invited to also submit their videos with you on trybe. They can re-submit any existing winners from tiktok as well.

  • Those videos will then be run as Whitelist or Partnership ads on meta.

  • You can also manage communications, sample seeding, and recruit new affiliates all through the Trybe platform (most creators are on or familiar with it already)

  • To prevent slop, you can manually approve/deny videos

  • Creators will receive 15% of sales generated by the ad as their payout for the rights to the video

    • 15% is our choice - you can choose whatever you’d like

    • There are two attribution models you can use: meta or trybe’s proprietary. We’re using Trybe but you’ll need to discuss with their team to decide what’s best for you.

  • For the best of the best Trybe also offers something called “Smart retainers”

    • These are volume based guaranteed minimum payouts

    • So, for example: I offer a creator a $1,000 smart retainer for 10 videos per month. They will receive $1000 guaranteed as long as they submit 10 approved videos. Even if they generate $10 of commission. And if their commission total is greater than $1000, they would receive that amount.

  • A very important bit of information on all of this: You can publish the videos directly through meta from the app. You do not have to download and manually upload the creative.

  

• Meta & bringing it all together

  • Now that you have your affiliate farm - what do you do with it?

  • Well, you spend money testing the creatives, obviously (hopefully a decent amount are already proven to convert)

  • The campaign structure and testing method we’re using to test is:

    • 1 CBO campaign per SKU

    • Each affiliate gets their own ad set within the CBO (up to 10 ads - then they get a 2nd)

    • Any video that reaches $100-$150 with 0 conversions is turned off

    • Any video with a .5 ROAs or greater at $200-$250 gets moved into scaling

  • We then provide feedback to the affiliates on what’s working so they can continue iterating on the angle

    • Trybe also provides leaderboards and analytics for them

In conclusion, we’ve been running this playbook for almost a month now and are getting 150+ creatives a week.

If you’re looking to scale and feel creative volume is what’s holding you back, I highly suggest giving this a go.

If you’ve read this far and are located in NYC I have a favor to ask: Our Yapper canned beverage is being featured in PopUp Grocer (205 bleecker st. West village) for the next 3 months. If you’re in the area pop in and pick one up ;)

TJ Bongiorno | Founder & CEO - Source

BTB Notes and Comments

If you want an analogy (which is never perfect), the new method to selling is identifying the undervalued influencers in a space. Everyone is going to try to go for the mega names but there is absurd value in identifying the better bang for buck (Trybe good proof of this)

Analogy is simple, cold outreach to various influencer is the new cold calling.

If you think that dialing the phone is too personal, that’s actually fine, get used to DM’ing and messaging a wild range of accounts that are considered under the radar. Under the radar would lead to better conversions, lower cost and high ROI.

Other Benefits: One of the other major reasons it works? If your product is good, the chances of getting a repeat buyer goes up multiples. Absurd actually. If someone clicks an ad goes through and buys your product, the stick rate is much lower vs a medium sized influencer that most households have never heard of.

Source

On that note back to selling!

If you’re interested in learning more about E-com, what type of biz to start, how to do research, or how to invest in tech oriented investments be sure to sign up and subscribe for a whopping 1 large latte a month in NYC!

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 addition to this, similar to the semiconductor cycle, we’re going to outline why we’r…

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From Part one on parenting (Source), we gave a quick high level on what to do. Main issues for most people is trying to “tough it” through sleep deprivation (…

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A…

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If you’re a wealthy foreigner? Many just park it in luxury real estate. If you just got your first “bag” ($30-50K in many countries is considered a bag), the first goal is to get that money into US based markets (NASDAQ/S&P etc).

Part 1: Big Picture

Ignoring the near-term (something everyone develops or cares about *after* they have made it), if we zoom out we can see the writing on the wall. There is just no way to get the budget to balance without a huge deleveraging crisis/mass layoffs at government level.

Good Luck Stopping This!

Source

While the socialists argue that the rich “control too much”, you can just smile and nod. The Fed is quite literally printing trillions of dollars per year which is causing the amount of money to fly up in a vertical fashion. They could allow for a deleveraging event. Problem is it would be politically suicidal.

Financial Cobweb of Problems

That’s just the big picture part. There is also an underlying bond/equity problem as well. When foreigners get rich, they do not want to leave all their assets in their country. In fact, their goal is to get it out as fast as possible to invest in the USA.

The ultra rich, they will buy stocks, bonds and of course those cash purchases of luxury real estate by the ocean. In addition, the recent come ups will take their $50,000 and try to move it to US markets as fast as possible. If you need any reminder of this Argentina is always the gold standard (Blue dollar rate, mass devaluation and a place where the Peso isn’t taken seriously in any business transaction).

Incredible Minus 99.58% decline over the last 20 years

Real Estate: Already well known. There are two major factors there: 1) illegal immigrants and 2) ultra wealthy foreigners that buy up houses with cash to land bank. We’re not here to debate if its good or bad, just doesn’t matter. The USA works the way that it does.

With this set up, foreigners actually want US prices/US success. If you take the long-view, the rich foreigners buying the home here just means their country will likely support the USA (the rich have the most sway in any country politically - since they generated the most economic value 9/10 times from absurd risk and effort).

Knew All This? Yep It Gets Worse Though

Lets say that the USA decided that it would print a bunch of money. Foreigners could potentially reinvest in their country. The problem is actually a lot bigger than most realize. The foreign market for bonds and stocks is ~25%. That’s right. A quarter of all purchases in the USA for bonds and stocks are being made by foreigners.

• US Stock Market about $95T foreign holdings about 21.4%

• US Bond Market about $61T foreign holdings about 26%

Once you do some quick math based on this, you realize that the wealthy across the globe lock up their money in the USA. 25% sounds “okay” since it is less than half. And. How many millionaires are available compared to the USA? Once you do that calculation it shows you the foreign rich are heavily exposed to US stocks and bonds.

The Next 9 Countries still don’t add up to the USA. China also has extreme controls to lock wealth in their country.

Proportionally, the wealthy foreigners will want to see the USA succeed as it is in their best interest. This should help explain why practically all the countries across the globe printed money during COVID, even the ones that didn’t really shut down to the extent that we did. Once the US moves, everyone follows.

Summary

While most just focus on the debt and real estate problem. The entire US market is intertwined globally at this point. You can click a few buttons and get access to US markets if you have basic tech savvy skills (hint: anyone rich will have access to the right tools/info globally even if they personally do not do all the managing themselves)

If we go through a downturn, the USA prints, the world prints and we get back to a baseline where people are not defaulting. Rough max length of pain seems to be 1-year based on what we saw in 2001/2008/COVID. For the doomers, your only real hope is that AI/robotics cause structural mass unemployment and UBI is rolled out. Our bet is that commerce just becomes more digital (IE. the work you do are not even named yet, similar to how we didn’t have a huge number of software/internet jobs in the 1980s, it didn’t really exist).

Part 2: Digging Deeper Into the Mechanisms

If you’ve read us for a long time, you know that for about 15+ years we’ve said that S&P/QQQ is basically a savings account. Unless you’re planning on retiring soon, you should just assume that is is a savings vehicle that will compound for decades (beating or keeping up with inflation)

That has largely panned out. The difference is that the main stream now believes the same thing. As more and more people pile into stocks/S&P they will begin worrying more about a "equity collapse” similar to the olden days “run on a bank” worries.

The Trump Accounts are highlighting this publicly as the only investment option is the S&P 500.

Thesis: S&P 500 is moving from “stock market” to the USA’s retirement plan, savings account, economic indicator and fundraising for the entire country (attracting foreign money). If we’re right on this, it means the government would not want to see a sustained stock market crash for longer than a year or so (print to save).

Now for Some Numbers

As of today, the US retirement system has ~$48 trillion, with ~$10 trillion in 401K accounts. All of this money is becoming more concentrated as well. The top 10 S&P 500 companies are about 36% of the entire index.

If you have 401K passive bids, new IRA passive bids, new children account passive bids and you have all this looped with a company match + general brokerage accounts it creates a self fulfilling cycle. Stocks go up, weights go up, contributions go up and more money goes to indexes vs. savings accounts.

This is stable unless you have a catastrophic event (deleveraging, COVID type downturn, a dystopian AI issue or an extreme War/Act of God).

While the Government can’t go in there and market buy S&P 500 every single day. They could easily pump money into the debt markets to create a floor on the decline (IE. stop the bleeding while making it look like they didn’t interfere with the stock market)

We’ve already seen a multitude of bullets fired. They can do any of the follows: 1) cut interest rates, 2) aggressive buying of securities for the Assets on the balance sheet, 3) flood system with money via dealer and repo market, 4) back money market funds, 5) choose certain industries to support (bank bailout, airline bailout) and 6) emergency facilities/stimulus.

All of this would get turned on to restore the stock market. It would be labeled as “saving the common person’s retirement” extremely easy sell.

Instead of directly saving the S&P, they would back stop the credit/plumbing system that prevents the S&P from dropping too low.

S&P is Systemic Now

Take a doom scenario of a -50%. This is possible and has happened before. It didn’t last a full year but it did cause max pain for a short period of time. If this were to happen today it would lead to: 1) backlash from retired community, 2) pension funds, 3) fundraising freeze, 4) RSUs blowing up, 5) Bank collateral disasters - Retail is now doing stock based loans and 6) significant decline in spending due to negative wealth effect. Oddly, even the billionaires care if their net worth says $1B instead of $2B.

Even Before This Huge Wave, it was rare to see more than 2 years of calendar year negative returns. Usually one and done.

Source

If the Fed was worried about a crash in 2020, take a look a the actual balance sheet of the typical household. The rapid rise in stocks as a percent of wealth is enormous when compared to just 7-10 years ago. In a sentence, economy and stocks are going to become increasingly correlated once people view it as “savings”.

Perhaps we’re biased, however, this seems to line up with our general long-term view of needing to be: 1) niche or 2) scaled up mega company. If there is a large passive bid, the biggest players (top 10 companies) just become larger and a bigger percent of the index.

Since people believe that the bailout will come no matter what, they will just click buy and perpetuate the cycle. Index becomes a savings account because investors believe it will be protected even if there is a one year ugly drawdown.

Summary

If you believe this then the conclusion is that you should only really actively manage a S&P/QQQ account if investing is your primary source of income. We’ll write that again. Unless investing is your primary source of income, S&P/QQQ sell offs shouldn’t be relevant to you.

If you’re at a point where investing returns are 2-3x your earned income, then you should pay attention to potential down years. Other than that, it does not matter for 99% of the population.

The second takeaway is that you really don’t need much more than ~2 years of living expenses at any time. If you have that in cash/liquid bonds/something similar, it will be “good enough”. If the market actually goes down 25% twice in a row, you’d survive it without being forced to sell near lows.

Part 3: Land of Opportunity Premium

The main competitive edge the USA has beyond controlling the money supply is controlling the global socio economic & cultural stage. Travel abroad and you quickly learn that foreigners listen to a ton of the same songs that you do. They just don’t understand them. They can recite it and sing along with zero knowledge of what it means.

While this is glossed over it is actually pretty important. As long as people believe the highest options will come from the USA, we’ll continue to poach the greats from other countries. We’re not even relevant in Soccer, yet Lionel Messi now lives in the USA (Fort Lauderdale).

If you look at the top CEOs in the USA, a large chunk are immigrants (Musk, Huang, Pichai, Nadella, Xu, Roman… the list goes on and on). They could have created companies outside the USA but as long as they think their chances of success are higher here (they are), they will continue to come in droves. ~12% of the S&P 500 CEOs are immigrants (also kills the whole idea that it’s impossible to make it in the USA if 88% are domestic).

On that note, if the USA is turning the S&P 500 into a savings account, we’re unsure how clear the message can get. Either learn to be an owner/operator and investor or join the crabs in a bucket chat around the company water cooler.

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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