It’s Tuesday afternoon a few years ago, my wife and I are out to lunch and we have the entire section to ourselves. It’s one of those new places where you have to wait a while for a table on the weekends but during the weekday lunches, the place is wide open. I don’t remember the circumstances but we both have the day off from work and we haven’t had a weekday lunch to ourselves in years so it was a nice welcome respite from the demands of life to enjoy a nice quiet lunch.

I remember distinctly thinking to myself how nice it was to have that opportunity in a nice quiet place to eat with my wife.

But then almost immediately I remember thinking how shitty it was that such a seemingly trivial thing like eating lunch had such an effect on me. Why was having one lunch on a random Tuesday such a momentous occasion to be celebrated?

After lunch we had some time before daycare pick up so we headed to Costco to get diapers and again, I’m struck by how quiet and peaceful it was. Dare I say pleasant? It certainly wasn’t the weekend Thunderdome edition of Costco we were used to.

That night I’m sitting in my daughter’s room after putting her to sleep and just ruminating the day’s events. The pace of the day, the ease, the carefree nature of it. It was intoxicating and I wanted more of it.

But life goes on and we just continue on again.

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Hi – my name is … irrelevant.

I’m a middle aged dad working day to day as a traveling consultant doing the Mon – Thur shift on the road most of the time so it puts a lot of pressure on my wife to handle her career and also family life. I end up missing a bunch of milestones with my daughter too because of it. But really it’s not the milestones so much as it’s just the daily time spent together I end missing.

The work is just a drag.

It’s a company owned by a PE firm and it just crushes my soul knowing I’m the one on the road away from my family while the PE firm just cashes in on our efforts.

I’m not a doctor but I surmise that getting zapped by TSA X rays twice a week, flying hours on end closer to the radiation layer, and breathing in recirculated fart air cannot be beneficial to my long term health.

A few weeks ago, the all mighty algorithm bequeathed a reel of a young woman touting a way to escape the 9 to 5 life via some online magic. Maybe it could sense the extra heavy bout of Sunday Scaries and decided to show that to me.

Her magic method? Online affiliate marketing.

Over the next few weeks, I went deep down the rabbit hole to read as much as I could from every (free) source I could find. You watch one reel and IG suddenly thinks it should show you every single post ever made on the subject. Which honestly I didn’t mind b/c it showed me a lot of different ways people were doing it.

From young women traveling to all corners of the globe in business class, young broccoli haired teenage looking boys promising $4k in a week, and what looked like AI avatars just talking into the camera.

I came across one that piqued my interest b/c they claimed they could do everything without showing your face online. On the spectrum of intro to extrovert, I’d consider myself FIRMLY in the 99% introverted camp.

One of my initial concerns was having to make videos online that showed my face and the reactions I’d get.

I have ZERO doubt the videos would be cringy af and the spastic editing style of today’s videos drive me crazy. How would this random middle aged dude with no experience in this field sell anything to anyone online?

I remember one time a coworker was having a birthday and people in the office wanted to put together a video with everyone wishing him happy birthday. If he were standing in front me, I’d be able to wish him happy birthday to his face with no preparation, no script, just talking like a regular functioning human being. But if I have to hold a phone three feet from my face, man wtf. That one 15 second video I finally sent took me SEVENTEEN takes and eight minutes.

I was not and am not cut out to be in front of the camera under any circumstances.

There’s also this sort of underlying bit of shame associated with even looking into this. I’m a college graduate with a decent job, family, and by all exterior accounts, I was doing pretty well in life. I really worried about my friend’s reactions on seeing this and judging what the hell I was doing.

So the faceless, anonymous route made a lot of sense and that’s what I’m gonna do.

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This site is just a way to build in public and share my journey with anyone interested (or maybe wants to help a brother out with some guidance).

Almost every single post I’ve seen online shows what they’ve already done:

• I made $1million selling digital products online
• I went from debt to $30k per month
• My fail safe system will show you how I went from zero to 750k followers

What they don’t show you is the grind on how to get there and quite frankly, it’s the internet. There’s no way of validating any of the things they’re posting. I have a feeling a good percentage of them are actually just AI avatars and aren’t even real people.

I wanted to record everything I’m doing here out in the open so one day someone may come across it and it’ll help them on their journey. I’m either going to replace my income or I’m gonna flame out but either way you’re going to see all of it. Either we win together or you can just not make the same mistakes I make.

So this is day zero. I have zero followers, zero products, zero anything except the will to start.

Why now?

I think it boils down to needs and wants.

For one thing, my daughter is getting older now and her teeth are fucked up. I love to see her smiling and laughing but her teeth are beyond crooked. She’ll need braces soon. Car and insurance after. College then. A wedding? Who knows.

I do know that I want the world for her and I want to be the father that can do that.

You know that scene in Goodfellas where Henry takes Karen through the kitchen of the Copacabana and then finally gets a table right up front?

I want that.

I want to be able to tip people in hundreds. I want to impress my wife. I want her to look at me the way Karen looked at Henry (before all the cocaine and stuff). I want to make enough doing this to retire her first and then follow shortly thereafter.

Let’s go baby.