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…had 47 browser tabs open like she was re-creating the matrix.

Eyes half shut. Posture of someone who’d been clinically dead for twenty minutes and just decided to come back because her coffee wasn’t finished yet.

Hair doing something ambitious. The laptop was practically breathing harder than she was.

“Rough day?”

“No. This is Tuesday.”

“What do you do?”

“I sell screenshots.”

Long pause. The type of pause where your left eye starts to twitch and your brain reboots…

“Screenshots… of what?”

“Ads.”

“You sell. Pictures. Of advertisements.”

“$37 a month. Updated every Tuesday.”

She turned the laptop around.

1,247 active subscribers.

$46,139 per month.

Selling screenshots.

My entire belief system left my body.

“Hold on. Where do you even get them?”

“Facebook Ad Library. Completely free. Public. I spend two hours scrolling and screenshot anything that’s been running longer than three weeks.”

“Why three weeks?”

“Because if an ad is still running after three weeks, it’s printing money. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that’s losing. The platform is doing the quality control for me. I’m just taking the receipt.”

“So your entire product… is screenshots you find for free on a website anyone can access?”

“Google Drive folder. 50 fresh ads every Tuesday. One sentence per screenshot explaining why it works. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”

“And people hand you $37 a month for that?”

She took a sip of her coffee.

“People hand me $37 a month to skip the two hours of scrolling they’ll never do. Time saved in the long run.”

“What’s your background? Marketing degree? Agency?”

“Receptionist. Got laid off eleven months ago.”

Eleven. Months.

Receptionist to $46K a month. Selling screenshots she finds on a free website, organised in a Google Drive folder a twelve year old could build.

“But… can’t people just do this themselves?”

She shrugged the way someone shrugs when they’ve heard this exact question 400 times and it gets funnier every single time.

“Can. Won’t. Different problem entirely.”

She picked up her coffee, turned the laptop back around, and disappeared into her 47 tabs like nothing had happened…

Now someone sent me this tale fresh off the LinkedIn bus. I re-wrote it a little to make it read better, cause people on LI are AI’d up to their nostrils.

Anyways. The lesson here is:

Simple is good and simple is profitable and in this chicks case. Very profitable.

While everyone is still gargling on the shiny metal balls of our future AI overlords. People who know people. Know that people are lazy shits.

As much as the techbros are force feeding that AI is going to take over everything. They forget that the majority of people don’t want to learn a new tool (Which is also very shit in light of new events) to then have to waste time to figure it out to do what they really need. They’d rather pay for what it is they’re looking for and be given it all down and dirty like…

Just like the people paying $37 a month for winning ads they can model.

Oh and guess what? This kind of thing is so easy to set up. You don’t need a blood sacrifice to finish it.

So think about it. What can you set up that’ll print money and make people’s lives easier?

Stephen Walker.

P.S. I’ll be throwing together a little doc that I’ll slide into The Escape Hatch

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

And then funny thing is, you paid for it too.

The lie is so fucking obvious that I’m embarrassed it took me this long to call it out.

In the MMO space. They told you that flashing income screenshots and Lamborghini photos would attract high quality clients to your business.

They sold you the dream that “income attracts income” and all you need to do is show people how much money you’re making to get them to pay you money.

And in the wise words of my favourite comedian of all time, George Carlin: It’s bullshit. Complete, grade A, premium bullshit.

But hey. Income porn looks good from a visual point of view. It looks sexy on Instagram reels and your Facebook feed, but you attract broke people who are desperate to make money fast.

(Yes. We’ve all been there. We’ve all started back in the day by Googling: “how to make money on the internet”)

But when you do all this online flashy bullshit about all the riches they can have. You end up getting clients who are more interested in your bank account than your actual skills.

You start to build an audience of wannabe entrepreneurs who think success is a Instagram story away and I mean if you’ve seen Instagram within the last 6 months. Holy shit balls it’s bad.

The thing is. These are not good clients. These are not people who will pay you premium prices for quality work. These are bargain hunters and dream chasers who will nickel and dime you to death while expecting miracles.

But your favourite guru frames it like it’s easy.

“All you need is $100 and this software and you can be raking in $5K per month in as little as 90 days!” Sure, it’s technically possible. (LLM bros lol)

But so is winning the lottery. Both require a combination of skill, timing, and luck that most people don’t possess.

What they don’t tell you is that those 90 days involve working 12 hour days, failing repeatedly, learning skills you didn’t know existed, and dealing with rejection that would make a telemarketer cry. They don’t mention that most people quit after week two when they realise that “passive income” requires active effort. I mean damn. Can’t I just push a button and make my millions?

People are lazy fucks who want results without work. Gurus know this, so they sell the dream and leave out all of those nightmarish steps. They show you the destination but hide the fucking mountain you have to climb to get there and the mountain sucks cause it’s covered in snow and there are wolves out to eat you, oh and you’re climbing barefoot AND it’s -20 degrees outside…

The coaching space is especially rotten with this too. Every other LinkedIn post is some “coach” showing off their Shopify dashboard or their course launch numbers, pretending that screenshots equal expertise, which we all know they don’t.

So you need to stop falling for it. Stop buying courses from people whose only credential is making money selling courses about making money or coaching coaches that coach coaches to coach coaches.

Fuck that noise.

Real expertise doesn’t need income porn to prove itself.

Stephen Walker.

Oh look another obnoxiously long url you should click on to join the escape hatch where cool shit will be posted for free

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

“Fear weaponizes your imagination against you.” – Jed McKenna

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Last week, I downloaded Instagram for the first time in 8 years.

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Turns out IG is a key middle-of-funnel conversion mechanism for Hinge leads in Mexico City…

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So the upside, I figured, would easily outweigh the downside.

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Right?

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Wrong.

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The moment I opened the app, I was slammed with ads from coaches coaching coaches to coach coaches who coach coaches, all of them saying some version of the same thing:

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“You’re screwed.”

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Business has never been harder, they say.

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It isn’t 2020 anymore, you can’t just press the internet button and make money fly out.

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You actually need a system, now, and the only system that works is my system, because every other system is so, like, 2021, and if you don’t install my system in the next 3 hours AI will run away with your business and your wife and leave you eating lonely microwave dinners with nothing but the cat for company, and he never really liked you anyway.

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The good news, they say, is you can book a “discovery” (sales) call with my “team” (outsourced sales agency) so we can help you “install” (buy) my system before it’s too late.

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If I sound old and cranky, that’s because I am.

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But I’m also old enough to know bullsht when I see it, and it’s the same bullsht gurus have been peddling since I started back in 2010.

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First it was “SEO is dead!”

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Then “blogging is dead!”

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Then “your cat is dead! — now you have to eat those microwave dinners alone because you didn’t install my system when you had the chance — just kidding, for a limited time only…”

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Every year, it’s the same story.

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The characters change, but the bullsh*t stays the same.

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After 16 years online, running multi-million dollar education businesses through ~3 generations of changes…

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The SEO, blogging & affiliate era (2010 - 2015)
The social media era (2015 - 2021)
The creator era (2021 → today)

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(and now, of course, the AI era which I suspect hasn’t truly begun, yet)

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…Here’s the honest-to-God truth:

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In some ways, online business has never been easier.

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My first website cost $5k, took 4 months to build, and had less functionality than a free WordPress template.

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The first app I built cost a quarter million dollars to launch, and 5-figures in monthly overhead to maintain.

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Not to mention, for the first half of my career, everything sold online was assumed to be a “scam”.

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These days, you can sit down with a cup of coffee at breakfast and have a fully-functioning business before lunch.

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And, you can do it at near-zero cost.

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Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

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(this is business, after all)

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The market has never been noisier or more saturated, for example.

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But that also means there are more founders, having more success than ever before.

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(that’s literally what saturation means)

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So please, don’t let the gurus scare you.

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Every era has upsides and downsides.

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And — big secret:

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There are always about as many upsides as downsides.

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The platforms may change, but the fundamentals always stay the same:

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Put your head down.

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Put your blinders on.

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Delete Instagram (she’s not worth it).

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And get to work.

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• T

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P.S. In case you missed it:

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​Here’s 16 years of business advice in 72 minutes.​

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(no fear-mongering, no Lambos, just high-level, battle-tested strategy that applies to every era of business)

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Got a few people reply who were hesitant about getting Telegram, cause they thought I was going to do what everyone and their dog is doing, which is build an “app” on Skool.

And frankly. That’s a valid question.

Firstly. The app ecosystem sucks. It runs like shit on your mobile phone and even if you’re paying for the premium features, people are still getting blasted with adverts to join similar communities as yours…

From a security standpoint, comparing Telegram to Skool…

Telegram is a bank vault, where Skool is essentially a cardboard box with a “please don’t steal sign on it”

Telegram offers end-to-end encryption for secret chats, meaning your conversations are scrambled into unreadable code that only you and your recipient can decrypt, this also applies to your groups you create and the content you decide to house on it too.

The thing is, even Telegram itself can’t read your messages.

Skool on the other hand?

It’s a centralised platform storing all your data on servers that governments can subpoena, hackers can breach, and corporate overlords can data mine for profit.

When you’re building communities discussing sensitive topics, do you really want some Silicon Valley company having full access to every word your audience shares?

Telegram keeps your communications private by design, while Skool treats your data like a product to be analysed, stored, and potentially monetised.

One platform was built by privacy advocates who fled authoritarian regimes. The other was built by entrepreneurs who see your audience as a revenue stream.

Now I’m not saying that I’m going to be creating a community that’s going to overthrow a government or whatever.

It’s just a place for me to store ideas, while giving people a place to rest their weary legs while they try run away from social media permanently.

I mean, have you been paying attention to what’s happening in the real world?

The UK’s Online Safety Act is tightening the noose.

The US is teeing up legislation that would make your grandmother’s Facebook wall a regulated utility.

Every centralised platform is one bureaucratic sneeze away from becoming a surveillance tool that makes your members uncomfortable, quiet, or gone.

And social media?

That’s already finished. It’s a rage-bait cemetery where 300 ChatGPT clones post the same “most people won’t tell you this” carousel while an algorithm decides who sees your stuff based on how angry it makes strangers.

Verified blue-tick wankers pretending life is perfect while behind closed doors we know it’s not. Although that won’t stop them from schilling some bullshit empowerment course to you and happily keep you on that hamster wheel.

Anywho.

You know what to do.

Stephen Walker.

Definitely not an obnoxiously long link to get you to join my Telegram group.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

You walk into a coffee shop.

It’s one of those coffee shops.

The kind where the barista has a tattoo of a French press on their forearm and the menu board looks like it was written by a calligrapher having a panic attack.

The line is six deep. The espresso machine is screaming like a banshee being fed into a wood chipper.

There are seventeen mobile orders backed up on the counter, and somewhere in the back, a blender is doing war crimes to a bunch of ice cubes.

You get to the front. The barista.

Bless their overcaffeinated heart, is already looking past you, already mentally juggling four oat milk lattes and a whatever the hell a “cortado” is.

They’re doing their best. They are a human being in a hurricane of dairy alternatives.

And you say to them “I don’t want black coffee.”

The barista nods. Or maybe they don’t nod. Maybe they just vibrate at a frequency that suggests acknowledgment. They turn around. They do things. Steam happens. Thirty seconds later, they slide a cup across the counter.

It’s black coffee.

Of course it’s black coffee, I mean you clearly asked for it right?

And you stand there, holding this mug of liquid darkness, wondering how the hell you got here.

You specifically said you didn’t want this. You were clear. You stated your case. You communicated like a grown adult human person (or so you thought, duh)

I need you to tattoo this somewhere you’ll see it every morning, maybe on the inside of your eyelids or whatever…

You didn’t tell them what you wanted. You told them what you didn’t want. And the only actionable noun in that sentence was “black coffee.”

That barista heard two words through all of the yap yap…

BLACK. COFFEE.

The “don’t” got swallowed. The “don’t” evaporated like a drop of water on a hot skillet. The “don’t” never stood a chance.

This is all about your brain though.

Your brain is that barista.

Your brain is an overworked, under appreciated, slightly frazzled meat computer that is constantly processing a multitude of sensory input, emotional garbage, intrusive thoughts about whether you locked the front door, and the inexplicable urge to remember the lyrics to “Mambo No. 5” at three in the morning.

Your brain is busy. Your brain is juggling flaming chainsaws while riding a unicycle on a tightrope over a pit full of your childhood traumas.

And when you tell your brain “I don’t want to fail,” your brain hears: FAIL.

When you say “I don’t want to be broke,” your brain hears: BROKE.

When you say “I don’t want to screw this up,” your brain grins its terrible little brain grin and says, “Oh, we’re thinking about screwing things up? GREAT.

Let me allocate all available resources to imagining, in high definition cinematic detail, every possible way we can screw this up.”

There’s actual science behind this, by the way.

I’m not just pulling it out of my ass.

A psychologist named Daniel Wegner called it ironic process theory, which is the most perfectly named thing in all of psychology because it is, in fact, deeply ironic.

Wegner told people, “Don’t think of a white bear.”

Guess what every single one of those people immediately thought about? A big, fluffy, undeniable white bear, lumbering through the tundra of their consciousness, refusing to leave.

The brain cannot process a negative without first conjuring the thing it’s supposed to negate. You have to build the image before you can try to un-build it.

And by then, it’s too late. The bear is in the room. The black coffee is in your hand. The failure is playing on a loop in your skull like a terrible movie you can’t walk out of.

This isn’t just woo woo law of attraction stuff, either. I mean, it is that too, if you’re into it. The whole “the universe delivers what you focus on” thing.

Fine.

Sure.

The universe is a space barista, and it’s very busy, and it only catches the nouns. I can work with that metaphor.

But you don’t even need to believe in manifesting or crystals or vision boards made out of magazine clippings to understand why this matters.

This is just how attention works. This is mechanical. Your reticular activating system. That’s the bouncer at the door of your conscious awareness, that lets in what you’re focused on and filters out the rest.

If you’re focused on debt, you will see debt everywhere. Reminders of debt. Evidence of debt. Opportunities to acquire more debt. Your brain will be extremely helpful in confirming that yes, debt is the central theme of your existence, because that’s what you told it to look for.

You told the barista “black coffee,” and by God, you’re getting black coffee.

So what do you do instead?

You tell the barista what you actually want.

“I’d like a lavender oat milk latte with an extra shot.” Specific. Positive. Actionable. The barista now has something to make, not something to avoid. That’s a fundamentally different task.

Sports psychologists figured this out ages ago. You don’t tell a golfer, “Don’t hit it into the water.” You know what a golfer’s brain does with that sentence? It takes a beautiful, panoramic mental photograph of the water. It studies the water. It falls in love with the water. And then the golfer’s body, being the obedient servant of the brain’s attention, sends the ball right into that water with the accuracy of a guided missile.

Instead, you say, “Aim for the center of the fairway.” Now the brain has a target, not a fear. The mental image is the fairway, green and wide and inviting. The body follows the picture. The ball goes where the mind was already looking.

This applies to and I cannot stress this enough, basically everything.

Don’t write your goals as a list of things you want to avoid. “I don’t want to be unhealthy” is garbage. Your brain just heard “unhealthy” and is now Googling symptoms of diseases you don’t have.

Try for the most part…

“I want to feel strong and energised.” That’s a destination. Your brain can work with a destination.

Don’t frame your creative work around what you’re afraid of. “I don’t want to write something boring” cause you just put the word BORING in forty foot neon letters across your imagination.

Try…

“I want to write something that makes people feel like they’ve been punched in the heart in the best possible way.” Now there’s a creative brief your muse can sink her teeth into.

Most of us spend an astonishing amount of our mental energy describing, in exquisite detail, exactly what we don’t want. We are poets of avoidance. We can articulate our fears with the precision of a surgeon and the passion of a revival preacher.

Ask someone what they don’t want, and they’ll give you a forty five minute TED Talk with slides.

Ask them what they do want, and they’ll stare at you like you just asked them to solve a differential equation in Klingon.

The real work is building the positive image. Getting specific about what you want. Giving your brain your overworked, overwhelmed, beautiful disaster of a barista brain, a clear order.

Walk up to the counter of your own mind. Look it dead in the eye. And say with your whole chest:

“Here’s what I’m having.”

Then watch it get made.

Specificity is key.

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/TheEscapeHatch

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom