How To Scam People Online So Hard It Feels Illegal
The uncomfortable truth about internet money and finding your true creative voice.
If you want to make a fortune on the internet today, there is a very simple, three-step formula:
Step one: Buy my $997 course on how to become a six-figure creator.
Step two: Create your own course teaching other people how to become six-figure creators.
Step three: Sell it to the people who couldn’t afford my course.
If anyone from the FTC asks, we are a “multi-tiered dimensional personal branding ecosystem.” (That’s code for running a literal Ponzi scheme out of a rented Boca Raton strip mall.)
But assuming you have a fragile conscience and don’t look good in an orange jumpsuit, you are forced to do it the hard way. You have to build a “personal brand.”
And currently, trying to build a personal brand feels like receiving an official decree from the Ministry of Internet Money:
MEMO TO ALL CREATORS
SUBJECT: Algorithm Optimization & You
To better serve the platform, we ask that you immediately select just ONE of your hobbies to talk about until the end of time. Please neatly amputate all other passions, personality traits, and spontaneous thoughts, and place them in the provided bio-hazard bins.
Failure to comply will result in us hiding your posts behind a viral video of a golden retriever eating a head of cabbage.
Thank you,
Management.
Naturally, you don’t want to do that. It is spiritual amputation. So you look for a loophole. And waiting for you with open arms is the creator economy’s favorite piece of modern advice:
“Bro. Stop overthinking. YOU are the niche. Just talk about your life, combine your unique interests, and the market will reward you!”
Oh, thank God. Finally. I can just be my authentic self. I’ll launch a personal brand at the unique intersection of "Jungian shadow work," "artisanal sourdough," and "passive income through Notion templates."
Where the hell do I park my Lamborghini?
I’ll tell you where: right next to the tooth fairy’s minivan, because "You are the niche" is the biggest fairy tale on the internet.
You look at the creators with massive audiences. Sure, today they can post a single quote about the cosmos, attach a picture of their espresso, and get ten thousand likes. But if you scroll back through the internet archives to 2019, you know what you’ll find?
They were the single-topic Facebook Ads specialist grinding out 4,000-word technical tutorials just to get five people to notice them.
Taking audience-building advice from a growth guru with 500,000 followers is exactly like taking financial advice from a guy who just successfully robbed a casino. “Just walk in and take the money, bro. It's so liberating!” Sure, it sounds fantastic when he says it. But if you try it with zero leverage and zero experience, you’re just going to end up alone in a very small, very sad room.
It’s survivorship bias wrapped in a Stripe check-out.
Telling people to “just be themselves” is easy when you already have half a million people hanging on your every word. But how about when you are starting out at absolute zero?
You cannot monetize “being you” when nobody knows who you are. The market does not care about your passions. It cares about problems. And when your audience is currently small enough to fit inside a 2008 Honda Civic, you cannot simply declare yourself a personal-brand guru.
You lack the gravity. And more importantly, you lack the data.
If you have a small audience, trying to find your niche is a trap. You don't even know what you're good at yet. When you're just starting out, you don't need a niche. You need a laboratory. You need to throw spaghetti at the wall until something sticks.
So let’s do ourselves a favor. Print the word “niche” on a piece of paper. Hold a small private ceremony. Say a few words if you need to. Then set it on fire and open a window.
The Niche Is Dead
I know we are all here to make a living with our art. Good luck with that. But money is not the point. Neither is the niche the problem.
There is something nobody in the creator economy wants to say out loud.
Most of the content promising to help you build a meaningful business is not built on generosity. It is built on the discovery that meaning sells better than money. That wrapping a business course in philosophy and identity work and the language of purpose makes it feel different from the obvious get-rich-quick scams.
But it’s not really different. It’s just better dressed.
Greed dressed up as purpose is still greed. It’s just harder to see coming. And considerably harder to walk away from because it speaks directly to the part of you that wants your life to matter.
The people producing this content are not lying. Most of them believe what they’re teaching. That’s what makes it so sneaky.
Here is the part that actually drives me crazy.
I have written about this before and I keep coming back to it because it drives me genuinely crazy that “how to find your niche” articles go viral every week while actively failing 99% of the people reading them. Not because the advice is stupid. Because it is structurally built for someone who is not you, packaged as universal truth, and consumed by people who then blame themselves when it doesn’t work.
The growth gurus built their audiences in completely different circumstances than yours with a completely different timing. Almost always they already had a reputation that helped them to take off. They look back at what worked and package it into a framework. But a lot of it was circumstance dressed up as insight after the fact.
Hindsight Bias is a terrible teacher. Survivorship Bias is worse.
When you follow that advice and fail, and you will fail because the map was drawn for someone else’s territory, you don’t question the map. You question yourself. Because realizing, that you spent months following structurally flawed advice, is too painful to admit.
Bankrupting Your Self-Trust
You have probably felt it. You read something that finally makes sense of everything, take notes, feel the momentum building, and go to bed thinking tomorrow is the day.
But in the morning you open their newsletter instead of writing. Again.
It’s not laziness. You are running a sophisticated operation to protect yourself from something that frightens you more than failure. The content gives you the buzz of forward motion without the exposure of actual creation. Every new framework feels like the missing piece, every course like the last thing you need before you’re ready. Your brain cannot tell the difference between thinking about your potential and using it, so it keeps choosing the option that feels like progress without the risk of finding out what you’re actually made of.
And the loop is costing you something nobody in this space talks about. Not time or money. Every morning you choose the content over the work, you make one withdrawal from the only account that actually matters, which is your trust in yourself.
You know this. That’s the worst part. You know exactly what you’re doing when you consume instead of create. And that knowing without acting is more severe than any external failure could be, because external failure you can blame on timing or the algorithm or advice that turned out to be wrong. But this is harder to explain away.
The gurus didn’t do this to you.
They just gave a very comfortable excuse to do it.
Here is what the content you’re consuming will never tell you, because it would immediately undercut the sale.
It sells you an identity. Think about it: Your unique combination of interests is your competitive advantage and the market will reward you for simply being yourself.
It tells you that you are already enough and you desperately want to hear that. That’s exactly why it doesn’t work.
You cannot think your way into a new identity. You can only act your way into one. Repeatedly. Over a long time. With real feedback from real people.
So you try. You post something, finally doing the dang thing.
You don’t have thousands of subscribers yet. That’s why you were consuming the “how to grow” content in the first place. So when you finally get the courage to post something, nobody cares.
That really hurts. If a marketing tactic fails, you can blame the tactic. But when the strategy was "just be yourself" and nobody buys it? That feels like a direct judgment on who you are.
Addiction with a Podcast Microphone
Here’s where it completely gets fucked up: You go back to their content. The thing that caused the damage becomes the treatment.
That's an addiction with a philosophy degree.
What you don’t see is that this is how the system works. In the beginning you will get ignored and the only way through is by stubbornly showing up. If your only drive is money or recognition you won’t survive this phase. You need to make peace with the fact that your work is going to suck for a while.
The gap you feel between the creator you know you could be and the drafts folder full of things that never got published is not a problem to solve. It is the most reliable sign that you are already a creator.
It’s means that you have a highly refined sense of taste. That’s a competitive advantage because it cannot be bought, taught, or shortcutted.
Every serious creator lives permanently in that gap. It doesn’t close with more skill. It widens, because your taste develops faster than your ability. Ira Glass said this better than anyone.
The gap between taste and ability is not a problem to solve. It is the engine of all creative development. You make bad work because your taste is already good enough to recognize it as bad. That recognition is not a sign you should stop. It is the only sign that matters that you should continue.
The Blueprint is the Problem
There is an old parable about three bricklayers. Here is my version of it:
You ask the first what he is doing. He says: “I’m laying bricks.” Then you ask the second. He says “I’m building a wall.”
You go on to ask the third. He looks up and says “I’m a cathedral builder. I’m co-creating a sacred temple.”
The first guy is waiting for a foreman to tell him what to do. The second is following a blueprint. The third is different. He is doing the work because the work itself is an act of devotion
Every brick is part of something people he will never meet will walk into centuries from now and feel something they cannot name.
The cathedral is a metaphor for work that serves something larger than the individual making it. A cathedral is built for a community. It outlasts the builder and creates value for people who will never know the name of the person who laid a specific brick.
That’s the business model done right. Not monetizing your passion. Building something that serves people so generously that compensation becomes the natural consequence rather than the desperate goal.
Now look at your situation honestly.
Right now, somewhere on your computer, there is a folder called something like “brand strategy” that you have opened maybe twice. That is the first bricklayer doing the work of the third. And some part of you has known it the whole time.
You know the difference between laying bricks and building something sacred. You cannot bring yourself to do the former when you came here to do the latter.
Embrace this refusal. It is your most honest impulse. You just have to answer the call instead of running from it.
The cathedral does not build itself on honest impulses alone.
Treat your daily work like an appointment with something sacred.
Show up to the page at the exact same time every day. Not to "grow your audience." But because sitting in that chair and making something out of nothing is the price of admission to a creative life. Embrace the suck. Make the promise to yourself, and then keep it.
That is how you buy back your self-trust.
Once you stop desperately searching for a niche, and just commit to the daily devotion of your craft without giving a damn about who’s watching, guess what?
Your voice will finally show up. And once your voice shows up, you’ll realize the niche didn’t need to be found. It was right there the whole time.
P.S. Everything in this article points to the same problem. You are trying to build something that looks like you without knowing what you actually look like.
I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of trying to find your niche.