Chapter 01
Affiliate & Offers
It's a Game of Traffic and Arbitrage
After years as a super affiliate, APX boiled the industry down to one sentence: it is a game of traffic and arbitrage. Timing, traffic sources, funnels, and method matter more than reinventing the offer. You work with proven offers that already convert, and convert at scale.
That is why he could do eight figures while rarely writing copy. He ripped existing angles and landers, iterated slightly, and scaled hard. The skill was generating traffic, not becoming a better copywriter. He called that path more technical and more niche than the DTC-style affiliate most people see on Twitter.
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Forums Beat Courses
As a new affiliate, he wanted people in forums, group chats, and conferences — that is where working methods actually live. Buying a well-known course and running Facebook traffic to Clickbank offers is too saturated.
He thinks X is a horrible place to find juicy methods. It is filled with junk and superficial BS. He used to scroll HackForums and BlackHatWorld and see interesting methods — actual gold, even if it was not served on a platter. Those forums are notorious for scams, but at least you are not looking at Lambos, fake watches, and platitudes every day. The shame, he said later, is that the forums are dying and everything is moving to Discords and social platforms.
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Affiliate Is Funneling People to Proven URLs
Social platforms have billions of daily users. It is free to join groups, post, get views, and get link clicks. Then there is this way to monetize it called affiliate marketing: you funnel people to URLs that are already proven to convert.
The catch: if you buy traffic the same way everyone else does — regular Facebook ads, the same DTC playbook — you do need real marketing skill. There are other ways to generate cheap traffic. In those cases you win by simply supplying traffic. Everything can be arbitraged if you find the pocket.
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Make Your Own Offer If You Want Scale or an Exit
Staying a pure affiliate caps you. It is very hard to even sustain $10–20M a year that way. Make your own offer. It is better for many reasons, and if you do a clean, branded approach you can actually exit it.
By late 2022 he was already transitioning out of affiliate toward a supplement brand. Too much headwind, too many things working against you. With your own brand, if you do things right, the other entities involved help you. Affiliate has low exit value and a limited talent pool.
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The Whales Keep the Setup Secret
Especially in affiliate, the big whales keep their setups secret. There are so many more ways to make money online than what you see on Twitter. On Twitter you mainly see DTCs, agencies, and UGC talk — the tip of the iceberg.
Top VSL offers, from what he could tell, were running traffic internally or with select agencies. Offer owners already understand the creatives that work and have templatized them. They do not need random affiliates as much anymore. Networks still leak winning methods — a typical way to recruit affiliates — but nobody doing 10–100x your volume is going to share much real alpha. Networking is a mutual value exchange.
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A $100k Day Does Not Make You Top Ten
A $100k+ day does not put you in the top 10 affiliates. Not even close. The ceiling in that world is much higher than Money Twitter implies, and the people at that ceiling are not posting.
His own affiliate years were sporadic. Networks constantly pinging for traffic, no time to reply to chats, then he would return out of nowhere. Most times it was because they had a better deal somewhere else or were pushing different GEOs.
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Test Offers Like an Affiliate
His early testing recipe was simple: assemble a few prelanders, create different angles and creatives, and split-test two or three offers. If CPA is $40 on Facebook, you only need about $500 of ad spend to know. On a weak ad network you need way more money, because Facebook filters out bad audiences fast.
He pointed beginners at Clickbank VSLs plus YouTube as a concrete place to start. And if you are running as an affiliate, he treated account bans as expected sooner or later, whether warranted or not.
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Easy-Come Channels Wake You Up Later
TikTok Shop affiliates, he predicted, are in for a rude awakening when they find out that making money is actually way harder, and that they have to pay taxes. Easy come, easy go.
He remembered a quieter era of the same pattern: back when TikTok was Musical.ly, a low-key guy was doing $600k a year posting videos with a link in bio — 90%+ margins, solo, automated — on CPI offers paying about $0.25 per app install, with funnels like Get FREE Followers. Those windows close.
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Local Lead Gigs Cap on Scale
Running leads as an affiliate into some type of offline business can look great on ROI and still be a dead end. How many leads can a single business handle? Very profitable on paper, meh on scale. The ones that do scale will be more competitive.
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Automation Is an Eight-Figure Affiliate Skill
Automation skills in affiliate made him eight figures, not kidding. It is a very high-value skillset because most affiliates cannot code or build systems. The people who can turn a working method into something that runs without them take a different share of the pot.
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Tripwires Let You Test Auction Zones
He sees tripwire offers constantly in biz-opp: a $7 digital ebook or course to get qualified leads, then you push main offers from mid to high ticket — $75–250 courses and add-ons, $1.5k–2.5k+ mentorship.
Talking with media buyers, the deeper use is that a tripwire is a way to test different sweet-spot ratio zones in the ad auctions. You set up a range of offers at various prices and appeals that interconnect for max LTV, then run ads into each zone.
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Network and Alpha Beat Equal Media-Buying Skill
Mindset and work ethic matter, but the biggest differentiator he named is your network of contacts plus alpha. You can be equally good at running Facebook ads as a super affiliate and still lose, because that person knows more people and that lets him run traffic to golden offers.
In his experience working with verified affiliates, he has never seen someone go out of their way to publicly share actual alpha of their main project. Revenue screenshots of a live winner are a tell, not a gift.
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Pick Networks That Monetize You
What he wanted from a network: have his back when things go south, pay on time with great terms, and — the big one — actively help monetize traffic with new offers, managing advertisers, and new opportunities. Most networks are just passive and do not really care about you. The useful ones act as a radar: a bird's-eye view of new opportunities.
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Chapter 02
Copy, Angles & Funnels
Testing Angles Is Highest-ROI Marketing
Testing angles is one of the highest-ROI things you can do as a marketer. The same failed product or offer with a different, killer angle can produce a massive difference. One product can have dozens of potential audiences.
Typically on a new product, ecommerce people run the low-hanging version first. He treated that as the default, not the finish line.
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Don't Build a Big Launch in the Dark
It takes time to find winning angles and creative formats. One of the mistakes is trying to build a big launch — you are just shooting in the dark, and it is expensive in time and energy. Find what works first, then spend.
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Swap Into Existing VSLs Instead of Hiring Writers
He found that taking existing VSLs and funnels and swapping in your offer, audience, and niche works way better than hiring copywriters to write new stuff. Most of the work is research, finding the offer/audience/niche, and creating an angle that converts — and even the angle you can rip.
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Research Where People Already Complain
A few good places, and you have to spend hours on them. Forums — Reddit and Facebook Groups are best — look for struggles, emotions, language style. Product reviews on Amazon — look for the features. Competitors via ad spying — look for angles, hooks, and the sales page.
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Fill Copy With You
So much copy he reads is just boring: talking too much about their own story, or in third person about something else. Juicy, engaging copy is filled with you. CTRL+F and search you. If your paragraphs have little to no you, those are risk areas.
He noticed he is way more engaged and paying full attention the more you is said. Literally CTRL+F you in any sales letter and see for yourself.
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Great Copy Captivates People Outside the Niche
If you show your sales letter to a friend and they say it is nice, but they do not know this niche — major red flag. Great copy should captivate anyone, even if they do not have those pain points. If it does not, the problem is your claims: they are not persuasive enough.
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Hooks and Leads Are the Tell
This is where most copywriters fail, in his view: creating curiosity and intrigue and then seamlessly funneling that toward your Big Idea, and eventually your offer. You can tell how successful a copywriter is based on their hooks and leads.
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Amp Emotion, Don't Abuse Fear
In 99% of cases, amping up emotions — fear, hope, curiosity, excitement — will improve your copy. Better retention and conversion. It is what lets you penetrate cold, low-intent audiences, which means more scaling power. It can hurt if you take it too far.
He called out a Memory/Brain VSL whose lead was so horrible and unethical it was insane. Agitation is powerful, but never take it too far or do it in such a distasteful tone.
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The Lead Has to Answer Why Me
On a Corporate Refugees promo he tore apart: too little about ME, too much about you and others. Why should I read this? What is it actually about? Who is it for? The subheadline was not clear. If the reader cannot answer those in the first screen, the letter is already dead.
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Don't Guess the Avatar
A lethal mistake when crafting a brand or copy is not understanding your target audience well enough. Your entire marketing starts to fall apart if you make the wrong assumptions. It takes no time to make a short Typeform survey and push some traffic to it. Don't guess.
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Copywriting Isn't Dead. Your Skills Are
POV: it is 2024 and you hire $70+ per hour copywriters. No, copywriting is not dead. Your skills are. He still pointed people at copy breakdowns by experienced writers as the best way to learn, and at taking what already works and adding your own twist instead of reinventing it.
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Marketing Power Is Why Cloned Ads Die
When studying top advertisers on Meta you need to understand what he calls Marketing Power. If you did your job right, you found their top winning ads. The naive next thought is: this ad is crushing for them, let's copy it and see how it does for me. The archive cuts off at his 9/10 qualifier — he was warning against treating a winner as a plug-and-play asset.
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The Ad Should Feel Like It Is About Me
When comparing creatives he asked: which one would make me stop scrolling and listen, as a skincare buyer? Which resonates with my situation and use case? Which feels like an ad versus natural content? Which one is about me versus a product? The interest hook wins.
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Framing Beats Content
How you frame information is ten times more important than its content. He called it the best low-effort, high-impact thing you can do in life. Quick example: no one bats an eye at a sub-500-follower account posting actual alpha. People pay 10x more attention to accounts with the right frame around the same information.
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Complex Threads Don't Produce a Blank Page
By the end of complex marketing threads he does not think the average person will have any clue what marketing materials to actually write. If you had to open a blank Google Doc after reading the thread, what would you even do? Theory that does not survive contact with a cursor is entertainment.
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Chapter 03
Ads, Creatives & Media Buying
The Profit Margins Are in Your Creatives
The profit margins are in your creatives. That's the tweet. He treated creative as the place unit economics actually move, not a downstream decoration on a media-buying system.
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High CPMs Often Mean You Bought In-Market Shoppers
One reason for high CPMs on Facebook: your creatives are catering to in-market shoppers — low-hanging-fruit traffic. That audience is more expensive because all your Facebook competitors are reaching them. It is easy and low effort. You get traffic everyone else already paid to educate.
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The Ad Library Is the Only Book
The Ad Library is the only book he needs. Combined with spy tools, it replaces most of the theory stack. What he wants in a spy tool: curation of top ads — Foreplay's Discover feature, which shows ads other marketers saved, is gold — plus a big database with likes and engagement, and the ability to filter by niche. He also found BigSpy better than the alternative he was asked about: bigger database, better filters, more features, cheaper.
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Build a System Around Stolen Templates
When asked how to improve creative variety: open all the spy tools, do a deep dive, save as many ad video templates as possible, replicate them, check the data, and set up a system around this so it is an ongoing thing. Second: think like a content creator. What type of content would they make around your product?
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Watch What Scaled Brands Actually Run
PetLab Co, a $100M+ brand, set $90 CPAs internally for their media buyers. ColonBroom was doing mass UGC and sending all of it through a quiz funnel — same for Bambu Earth, each around $1M a month. He also pushed running a VSL in the ad, because Facebook sees that creative differently than a static.
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Meta Prices the Conversion, Not Just the Bid
Why does Meta look at EAR — conversions — in your ad bids? Why doesn't it just sell the impression to the highest dollar bidder? Aren't they leaving money on the table? He said there is both an economic/business reason and a technical one. The useful operator takeaway is that your conversion rate is part of what you pay, not a separate problem after the click.
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USP Has to Show Up in the Picture
A solid ad, to him, focuses clearly on the main USP — both visually and in the copy. If the picture does not carry the claim, the line usually cannot save it.
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You Don't Need Paid Ads Under $20M
You don't need paid ads unless you are aiming for $20M+ a year, or your product is so good that ads are instantly profitable with low effort. Organic works in part because it cuts out ad costs. You generate free impressions instead of buying them. Growth-hacking social — farming engagement by exploiting the algorithm — he put at 90%+ organic follows, and not worth running ads: too much friction and no attribution. Value depends on niche and demographic; most profit in those plays sat in MMO or tech.
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Chapter 04
Ecommerce, Product & LTV
Three Reasons to Enter Supplements
There are only three reasons to enter supplements: large TAM, repeat customers, and low COGS. If you do not have those, you are in the category for the wrong reasons.
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Frontend Gets You to $100M. Backend Gets You Past It
The pattern he was seeing: you can get to $100M in total revenue with a strong focus on marketing and traffic sources — who can get the best CPAs, the frontend stuff. If you want to go bigger, you need to compete on product and LTV, the backend.
On a big enough scale it is all about LTV. You will pay whatever the average CAC is on the market.
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Don't 50%-Off Your Brand
Don't do 50%-off discounts. That is horrible advice in his view. You tarnish the brand, screw existing customers, and when your margins are already strained, why would you discount? Second: clarify your messaging and what experience you are offering, so cold traffic can instantly get it.
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Customers Don't Notice Your Eco Packaging
One of the biggest cringe moments as an entrepreneur — and a huge red flag — is founders needlessly taking on expenses because they think it makes a difference, or that the customer will even notice. Especially with eco-friendly DTC.
There is a ton of value in brand. Most people over-prioritize it, and they do it at too high a cost in dollars and opportunity. Unless you are growing to a billion dollars, focus on happy customers — reviews — and a nice enough presentation.
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Charge as Much as You Can
Are you sure you are charging enough? Ridge was charging €19 for a small piece of plastic. Charge as much as you can sounds super obvious — you will be laughed at — and yet when you look around, 80%+ of people just don't do it right. He has been told duh, that's simple more times than he can count, while watching the room fail the simple thing.
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Fix the Product Before You Spend 1,000 Hours Selling It
You can either spend 1,000 hours trying hard to sell a shit product, or you can spend a tenth of that on the product. Headwind versus tailwind. Be smart. If you want to get the most out of your marketing skills, try to avoid sub-$50 products. Look for higher-ticket, $250+. It will be less crowded, because fewer people are competent enough to sell at those price ranges.
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Real Moats Are Not Your Email Flow
Post-purchase funnel is the right direction, but if he sees a store doing huge numbers he will place an order. A small cost for the intelligence. Real moats, as he listed them: manufacturing, fulfillment, and product — patents — then distribution channels, Amazon, retail, and so on. The things you cannot swipe from a thank-you page.
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Brand Absorbs Volatility. DR Does Not
Branded products can absorb volatility better because they have loads of warmed-up audience pools — middle-of-funnel people who know the product but have not pulled the trigger yet — that can absorb spend as a fallback when first-click-buy traffic dries up. DR funnels do not get that cushion.
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The Amazon Price Paradox
Supplements expose the trap. DTC price has to be $49 a bottle to make it work. Amazon alternatives sell for $25. If you price it lower on Amazon, people escape from your paid funnel and ROAS dies. Overall the DTC route is still better if that is your skillset.
A #1 Best Seller badge can be deceiving. When the paid-ads offer is $39.99 a bottle and the Amazon sale is $19.99, the milestone is cute for social media and can be a negative NET on the bottom line — you are paying Meta to educate shoppers who check out cheaper on Amazon. Sponsored Ads, in his view, is Amazon's way of sucking out sellers' net margins: a pay-to-win game, because as a new seller you need sales volume to rank, and Amazon will sell you guaranteed sales.
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Brand Lets You Enter Hard Categories
This is why a good brand is worth a lot of money. Ridge has over a million customers that trust the brand and its durable products. Because of that instant trust and brand recognition, they can go after hard, profitable product categories with momentum.
Building a brand around your product is both easier and harder for Chinese copycats to take away. Their whole model is figuring out how to copycat your product and undercut your pricing.
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Study the Consumable That Gets Snacked
He was ordering new successful products — Grüns gummies, David Protein — express to the EU via MyUS just to hold them. David bars: 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, best ratio he had seen, $3.60 a bar. LTV, he figured, must be insane, probably $150–200+ a year.
He had tried AG1 and Grüns. You can see why people like Grüns: you snack on it while watching TV or driving. Portable. No powder container and water. Just eight gummies a day. The product is the retention mechanism.
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TikTok Shop Is a Platform Subsidy, Not a Marketing Masterclass
He disagreed with calling TikTok affiliates the best marketers. The real reason TikTok Shop works has little to do with the marketing and everything to do with TikTok aggressively investing in the Shops product and ecosystem. He wanted to address the gold rush. The videos are short. There is much more to unpack and learn from traditional direct-response pieces — long-form TSLs and VSLs.
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Clean Brands Don't Need a Dirty Backend
Plenty of DTC brands are crushing it with decent margins. David Protein, launched the year before he wrote it, was the recent example. As an affiliate he used to assume there had to be some aggressive backend tactic behind brands like that. After spending a lot of time reverse-engineering them ahead of launching his own health brand: nope, not really.
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Let Customers Do the Selling
You don't need to be a great marketer. Just be good at letting customers do the selling. You can get really far by gathering amazing testimonials. He would argue there is no better marketing than peer to peer. As a buyer, there is nothing better than hearing it from someone like you.
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A Few Thousand Buyers Can Be a Billion-Dollar Business
Richard Mille made $1.8 billion in a year selling 6,000 watches — probably fewer than 4,000 unique new customers. Extreme price and extreme LTV beat extreme traffic. The same shape shows up at the other end in mobile: Last War and Whiteout Survival doing something like $300M a month combined, spending a billion on ads to make their first billion in revenue, then cruising at 20–40% EBITDA.
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Chapter 05
Information Hygiene
Revenue Pics Are Not Bank Balances
Everyone's posting revenue pics. No one's posting bank balances. Lesson in that. In business, your net worth reflects your true worth. Someone posts $150k/day Shopify stats: you cannot project that for a whole year — it is likely peak numbers; unforeseen risks (payments banned, inventory) are huge hits on profits; and you don't know the rest of the stack.
He finds it annoying when people flex unrealized net profits or very optimistic forecasting — real estate, crypto, digital assets, whatever. They talk about the upside and not the downsides: risk, time, missing factors.
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The Screenshot-to-Telegram Funnel
Posts stats, then adds join my Telegram/newsletter as a reply: red flag. Or it is just a straight-up agency account. Most agency screenshots don't mean much. No way to know if it was cold traffic or what the real contribution was.
If the agency is based in Dubai, especially if it is run by a young dude: red flag.
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It's Easy Bro Is a Course Intro
What's the point of a tweet besides funneling into your courses? If it was easy everyone would be a millionaire. If he was starting out and kept failing — as 99% of people will — and the successful guys were saying it's easy bro, that would demotivate him.
Anyone can easily do $5k a month profit on the internet. Get outta here. Reads like some MMO offer intro.
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Beginners Learn Bottom-to-Top
The #1 reason most beginners get stuck online, he is pretty sure: they learn from bottom-to-top versus the other way around. Joe hears about affiliate marketing. Screenshots with numbers, lean ops, better than ecommerce. He likes what he sees. Soon he is studying the screenshot instead of the system that produced it.
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Actions Beat Words
Well well well, another faker exposed. Actions over words. Be careful. He has never, in his experience with verified affiliates, seen someone publicly share actual alpha of their main project. If they are broadcasting the live winner, ask why.
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Don't Follow Billionaire Platitudes
Please, don't follow billionaires' advice. Don't be one of the build-and-they-will-come types. It is not necessary. The people giving that advice are not running your constraints.
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Chapter 06
Mindset & Execution
Ask What Your Edge Is
When considering a new business venture, always ask: what's my competitive edge? If you cannot think of one, you are probably getting scammed, or you are missing something and reality will slap you in the face. How much you earn largely comes down to your edge.
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Model One Working Project
One of his keys to success is literally modeling a very specific person or project. He cannot tell you how many times he faced hard roadblocks when building and the only thing that pulled him through is knowing for a fact that it is working for them. If it's working for them, then it can work here.
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Get Your Idea Shredded
It is a real gift to have a more seasoned entrepreneur shred your idea and point out the weak spots. Whenever he has a new idea, he runs it by trusted partners and wants them to really criticize it. Saves months of effort.
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Endless Drive Beats Intelligence
Endless drive beats intelligence. He has yet to meet a dumb but highly driven person who is not successful in some way. They find a way — path of least resistance. The intelligent person has the brain and will give up far quicker and resort to Plan B.
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Motivation Over Discipline
Motivation over discipline. You need strong discipline and work ethic for big goals. But there is something about feeling truly motivated. It electrifies your brain on a new level: the clarity, the energy, the out-of-box thinking. Both are important. Yin and yang.
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If You Have What It Takes, It Materializes
If you have what it takes to be successful, it will materialize given enough time. All you might need is a little push, to hang in there, and to believe it is possible. He gets messages asking for advice, and he can tell most people are not actually deeply serious about their goal.
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Dumb Yourself Down
Dumbing himself down has led to better, more practical business choices and outcomes. His brain has a tendency to approach things from a what's-the-smartest-way-to-do-this point of view. He would over-analyze, over-strategize, just generally overthink. You think you are being smart.
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Find the Blueprint and Repeat It
Big success comes from finding or creating a golden blueprint and doing it over and over. Trust him. With every successful young person it comes down to that, including himself. It becomes a template. That is why maintaining $1–2M a month is way easier than getting to that number.
For him, success in both affiliate and ecommerce has been worse than the pretty version: something like two years of suffering and pain to make it. Fails, confusion, doubt, the whole cycle. Miserable, drives you to insanity. Also much harder than maintaining $1M a month.
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Comfort Is Why People Don't Get Rich
It is not about can't as much as it is about wanting to. Yes, it is easier than ever before to get rich. It is also easier than ever before not to. If you are middle class, your life is pretty comfortable. All your basic needs are covered. That is the real opponent.
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Every Era Has Its Own Hard Mode
Some people say boomers had it way easier. To him that is the same as saying affiliates and ecommerce had it so much easier. He calls that mid-IQ reasoning. Every era has its unique challenges. Stuff that is trivial now was not, and the reverse is also true.
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Don't Lever Like a Billionaire
You should be in debt because that's what billionaires do bro. His response was two letters. The people giving that advice are not underwriting your downside.
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Burnout Is What Happens When You Redline for Years
Burnout isn't real comments are cringe and immature. Instantly tells him you have not really pushed yourself to the absolute max. Burnout is really common with high-performing people. It is what happens when you redline your engine for years.
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Obsession Makes Failure Hard
If you are this driven with making your business work, it is legit almost impossible to fail. A part of his mind is always thinking about the business. He will sometimes have random lightbulb moments throughout the day.
On a day-to-day, lizard-brain level — not a philosophical one — it is maybe 10% about the money and 90% about the feeling of success and winning. Being in the top 1%.
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Find a Corner of Eight Billion People
Online is still easier. Yes, you are competing against 160-IQ nerds, but your market is also eight billion people. So actually it is pretty easy to avoid the nerds and find your own little corner. The internet is only a few decades old. It is evolving, very dynamic.
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The Old Path Doesn't Set You Up
The world is super competitive. If you are not actively trying to build wealth these days, you are slowly getting left behind. What worked well in the past — go to college, get a job, save money, buy a house — does not set you up as well today.
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Grow the Number, Shrink the Hours
His goal is to keep growing numbers as he ages while decreasing time spent and minimizing stress. Keep the dopamine flowing. That means being smart with business moves now and building things that can keep growing, delegated to teams in place. He also no longer really needs the money the way he used to.
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It Usually Takes a Year to Get a Project Going
Building a new online project — a DTC brand — his working week was the grind, and it usually takes him about a year to really get a project going. That is the default timeline he published, not a weekend sprint.
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Marketing Beats Better Code
Hot take: many smart devs with 0% marketing skills are basically incels but in business. But my software is better, why am I not even getting a tenth of the sales? The world just does not care about code. He wishes it would reward you for your hard work. It is not how it works.
OpenAI or Google can build it can be said about any SaaS. The customer gives zero fucks. It is only devs who say this. You can rebuild Notion or Slack or Monday and add more features and still not come close to dethroning them.
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Physical EU Business Has No Leverage
Starting a physical business in an EU country looks depressing: huge capital requirement, expensive properties, expensive employees, loads of red tape. Even then the scale is limited. If you cannot create leverage and you need to hire many employees to scale, you are in the wrong structure. He was speaking mostly for Belgium and the surrounding countries.
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Crypto Side-Quests Are a Version of Hell
Crypto and Web3 people, to him, are so far removed from reality it is insane. Stuck in a bubble of rugging others and getting rugged. No real-world utility — those are just marketing schemes. Wasting years learning DeFi and NFTs.
He looks at ex-affiliates who went to build on some random crypto or NFT chain when the market was hot and are still stuck there. Solving all these hard problems when the market just wanted a quick bag and dipped. That has got to be a version of hell.
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Leverage Beats a Long Career Ladder
A tax advisor asked him what he actually does. Later it got him thinking: how is someone like him, early 20s, out-earning someone who has built a career for decades — by a lot. The answer goes deeper, but the shape is leverage versus linear time.
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Luck Is Picking the Right Project at the Right Time
Asking successful people how they did it is a meme for a reason. His own addendum: luck for picking the right project at the right time, the right opportunity — that can be the difference between $10M net worth and $100M+. Better way to say it: fortunate versus dumb luck. Clone the same Zuckerberg in today's era, spawn him in the EU, and he would not still create a $1.7 trillion company.
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Chapter 07
Money, Investing & Lifestyle
A $300k Lifestyle Needs $8.5–10M Post-Tax
If you want to sustain a $300k a year spending lifestyle, only relying on passive investing returns, you need $8.5M to $10M in net, post-tax assets. His assumptions: 2.5% yearly inflation, 6% yearly returns with 85%+ of assets invested, and 25% capital gains tax on withdrawals.
If the popular $5M number is based on a 4% withdrawal for a $200k/year lifestyle, he thinks you probably need more like $7–8M net worth, because the $5M would have to be actively invested — then there is the house, cash reserve, and other assets.
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Buy When You Yourself Are Scared
Buy when markets are fearful sounds easy. In reality it means you have to buy when you yourself are feeling legitimately concerned. Anytime he feels real fear about the markets, he knows it is time to buy more. Generally he is optimistic about the world.
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Cash, Crash Buys, Accumulate
His investment plan: hold in cash, convert EUR to USD; buy S&P 500 when markets crash and there is irrational fear, based on his own gut; hold and accumulate. In a world where many want to get rich off the stock market and treat it as active income, that is the opposite posture.
He likes to keep $1M post-tax in the bank as an emergency fund. He keeps enough in business accounts to fund the business — which is not capital intensive — and wants the remaining funds to just grow.
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Don't Force the S&P for Short-Term Cash
Don't buy S&P 500 for the short term. The 7–8% annual ROI is just an average. He recommended parking funds in Interactive Brokers — secured up to $250k — with a 4.7% yield that accrues daily and pays monthly, withdrawable at any time. Coinbase was offering 4–5% yield in the same window. These rates move; the idea was cash that works without equity risk.
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First $100–300k Revenue: Save, Don't Upgrade
If you have made $100k–300k in revenue — assuming 20–40% margins — you 100% have to keep saving. First, assume 50% of your profits will go to taxes. You are left with some nice savings and some breathing room, but it is not enough to upgrade your lifestyle.
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Buy the House Outright If You Can
The $5M is usually accrued over years. It does not hit your account overnight. Personally, when it comes to the house, the place you live, he would just buy it outright if you can. Full peace of mind, no risk and debt. He has also said the best financial advice, generally, is to buy a house ASAP and stop paying someone else's mortgage.
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A Million Invested Does Not Make a Billionaire
He tried a new approach to poor-me threads. I would be a billionaire in my late 30s or 40s by purely investing and doing a cashflow business. Wrong. You will not get anywhere close to a billion dollars with just investing your liquid $1M plus a half-active business.
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Would You Still Buy It If Nobody Saw It
Would you still buy it if you could not show it to anyone else? Sometimes just knowing you can get one is all you need. If you are making a ton of money at a young age, you feel like it will keep going — that even if things crash, you will just figure it out. Remember that the feeling is the trap, not the proof.
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Don't Day-Trade Against the World's Top Nerds
This is why he cringes at traders, and why it is just gambling for 99.9% of people. The stock market is 1,000x more competitive than ecommerce or anything else — you are up against the world's top nerds. You cannot beat full-time trading professionals with 10% of your time. For him it is mostly to preserve wealth by shielding against inflation, plus some long-term speculative investing in tech stocks he thinks about often. Meta was his biggest.
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Zero-Percent Tax Has Strings
He does not really believe in 0% tax. There are always strings attached one way or another, or minor disadvantages that add up. You can cut tax rates down quite a bit with smart tax planning. His life does not change much whether he pays 40% or 10%.
Dubai, as far as he knew, is like 9%+ tax. In the EU you can usually bring the rate down to 35–40%, which is not too bad. If you plan to do two or three years abroad and just return, when you move funds back the banks will ask questions.
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Chapter 08
Team, Moats & Case Studies
Partner With Complementary Skills
If you are starting out in your online-money adventure, team up with someone who shares your work ethic and has complementary skills. Having someone to bounce ideas off and carry some of the workload speeds everything up 3x. He rarely does a venture solo.
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Hire With a Contest, Not a Hunt
After having hired manually, he can say: don't force it at all. Host a contest and just pick one that shares your style and has the desired skill level. It is a numbers game. Ukrainian agencies, in his experience, have some of the best cost-to-quality ratio, and they are very nice people to work with.
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Persona Plus Affiliates Plus a Simple Offer
He estimated Andrew Tate had easily done $100M+ with HU2, probably the single source funding the lifestyle — $10M+ monthly, all profits. He plays an alpha-male persona but deep inside is a marketing genius.
The pieces: controversial content that resonates, an affiliate army spreading clips on TikTok and Instagram — a massive distribution network — and a $50/month paid Discord where noobs learn trading, copywriting, affiliate. Problem: the Matrix is controlling you, the root cause of why you are unhappy. Solution: HU2, escape the Matrix. The luxury is the ad. Cars and a $5M Bugatti write off as marketing and cement the Rich Guy image. Low churn on a cheap subscription is gold.
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Zuck Saying No Was Calculated, Not Reckless
He does not believe Zuck declining Yahoo's $1 billion bid for Facebook was super shocking. You definitely need balls to say no to $1 billion, but Zuck is a calculated entrepreneur who carefully weighed the pros and cons, and he was fortunate in ways the myth leaves out.
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No lessons match.