59 · Vending Machines for Pain

The list of virtual communities with more than a million users — a very great place to see market consensus, the problems people keep placing, and a fast solve to those problems. Go on Reddit and you can tell almost instantly what the clear pain points are in a market. The more succinctly you can encapsulate what exactly is hard about something, the more that articulation itself is the solution. Go into the people pools and solve the problems they are actually having — a very direct plug. Then market intensely.

On Reddit we see that coding is hard. Okay, that's one observation — but that's not it. What is one post that went viral? That's a thousand people suffering real pain from a specific problem, and we can generalise: those common stresses are the manifestation of a pervasive, universal problem. Coding for people — writing the code for them — is a business that the tools already suggest. And marketing in those exact spaces is going to be dope. Why is nobody doing this? Why don't I see Elon Musk going on Reddit asking what Grok is doing wrong? Why don't I see Sam Altman asking what needs fixing right now, then iterating from there? When I scale my online business and reach a following, I will never avoid an obvious method that works just because of ego. Go on Discord, Reddit, Quora, and ask questions as a founder and CEO. Finding a ubiquitous problem for a broad audience, or a strong pain point for a niche group — both work. The first has a lower conversion rate but scale covers it; the latter has higher conversion and more desperate emotion, so it pulls leads harder.

On Reddit you can see market size manifest: funny videos, memes and comedy; askreddit and today-I-learned (curiosity fulfilment, the natural thirst for knowledge); gaming (a massive and growing industry); sports, music, movies (entertainment is an evergreen niche); science and space. The macro seems to compress into conjuring emotions and throwing people off balance on the emotional graph: one, entertainment; two, fear and greed stimulation (news); three, curiosity and wonder; four, hope and vision. Ironically the strongest emotional stimulant is sex, which is why adult sites have such high retention — and that moves into a moral question. So anything works: enter an existing market because you know it pays, replicate what works, do it at larger scale with greater outreach, then do it better — the worst outcome is lawsuits, which make you viral anyway, because negative attention is still attention and eyeballs get collected. Or go into the mainstream evergreen niches — gym, entertainment, fear-and-greed. Or dive deep into micro-niches: Reddit communities under a thousand people, dense with a common thread of suffering; solve that bottleneck, find the real people, comment to every one of them — yes, you'll get banned, but the reach grows. Or create a new market by providing what people didn't know they needed. Or revisit something old — with radical focus on the new, the old becomes fresh again.

Which niches to enter: things that are painful, funny, cute; things that evoke greed or fear — anything that stimulates a strong antinode of emotion. Anything that moves the needle of emotion collects attention.

The great thing about online business: zero barrier to entry, no capital burning, infinite leverage through organic marketing and outreach — and tie your personal brand to it and the scale keeps growing. When you have ten billion videos of yourself talking or doing the most random things on YouTube, that alone scales your pendulum. The world has allowed this to happen.

About short-lifespan businesses: if you had started a mask company even after Covid broke the world, you would still have made unfathomable money, because the fear bias shifted demand so far right. Knowing your business will die after a phase, you can still extract unfathomable gains before it's defunct. Don't be afraid to enter and exit a short-lived market: get in, get rich, get out.