55 · The Anchor Number

I need to — I just will bring it into existence. The goal: a fully automated £10k/month AI-service-based online business before university, alongside saving up to £50k through work experience and sales jobs. Thirty hours a week into job experience, the remaining seventy into personal research.

The way to actually excel — to focus less on fast money and more on skillset development — is building an administrative, AI-agent-leveraging online business with solid income, around £10k–20k a month, so that I'm set, and so that I don't overindulge in ego, pride, greed and fear. How do I launch and stabilise that automated business — the daemon that runs in the background with timely commitment but zero emotional involvement — within one or two quarters? I'm leaning toward high-ticket sales: selling to and solving rich people's problems. Fewer clients, long-term relationships. The ideal is one or two SMEs generating seven to eight figures; you solve one small problem inside their firms — client funnel optimisation, say — and you get paid £10k a month from each. It shouldn't take enormous effort; it's something you attack radically for a phase, and once it's stabilised in your routine it's rote repetition you get out of the way.

The likely trajectory: start the online business, do high-ticket tutoring for Oxbridge and Russell Group admissions for Korean international students on the side, run freelancing for Mercor that pays decently, and automate each stream — so there's income that releases the stupid obsession of staking your life on every trade.

Brother, life gets so much easier when you have just enough money for rent, groceries and bills. An extra £3k a month is genuinely life-changing, and a small online business covers that. The first goal is not to be a millionaire with this. My goal is the first 500 dollars online that replaces the Tim Hortons job.

Like the zero-to-one is going from scratch to launching the first online business. I'd love the first sale in Q2, £1,000 a month by the end of Q3, £2,000 by end of Q4 — that alone transforms London. Your billion-dollar ambition starts exactly this small. Then scale into anything meaningful.

The only emergency fund you need is $10k–30k and a plan for when everything is fucked — a lifestyle you could actually live: back to Bali or Georgia or Thailand with a minimal setup, making it work. That feeds you for a year. You'll be hitting rock bottom sometimes — and if you're not hitting rock bottom every once in a while, you're not taking enough risk for a business to grow.

When you have £10,000 as a one-time purchase you can sell the optimal, full-detail, one-on-one coaching for personal statements, TMUA, interview prep, everything. People say they can't afford that — so you also have a £2,000 package with partial access. That's the route most people take: give away as much value as possible for free, build genuine credibility and trust, let the personal brand open the door — and the first barrier to entry is a free PDF. Then a £9.99 PDF: the blueprint of how I got a 9.0 TMUA.

Everything that is shown in public starts when you're in your room, dorm, wherever — alone, working, studying, reading, coding, struggling, wrestling. That's how it gets done. Don't expect to make money soon — even at Cambridge. Be willing to grind the unglamorous channels for five years. Lower the expectations, raise the floor.