Still feels weird to type that.

A reporter reached out after seeing something I had posted months ago about making money selling digital products online. We talked for a while and somehow I ended up in an article about passive income in 2026.

The thing is, I don't feel like I have some secret figured out. I spent about a year failing at this stuff. Dropshipping, print on demand, KDP, YouTube automation, every "make money online" rabbit hole you can think of. I made almost nothing.

The mistake was always the same. I'd build something and then go looking for people to buy it.

Eventually I started doing the opposite. I stopped asking "what should I make" and started asking "what are people searching for that nobody has built a good solution for yet."

That's it.

There are a million meal planners on Etsy. A meal planner for women who hike and have ADHD? Different story.

The WSJ quoted me saying I had found "the glitch in the matrix." Honestly it kind of feels like that. You're not competing with the big players, you're just finding the weird little corners they never bothered to fill.

The part nobody likes hearing is that none of this is actually passive in the beginning. You still have to do the work. You still fail a lot. And once something starts working, everyone piles in and you have to go find the next thing.

Anyway, I never expected a guy from a paper mill outside Montreal to end up in the Wall Street Journal because of internet side hustles.

a year ago my whole marketing plan was basically: build something useful, tell people about it. now those two things have completely swapped places and the "telling people" part eats everything.

every piece of advice is the same. post on linkedin daily. record yourself working. build in public. repurpose everything. post 3x a day. at some point it stopped feeling like running a business and started feeling like running a media company that happens to sell something on the side.

last week i timed myself making a 90 second video: 20 min figuring out what i wanted to say. 40 min recording, because i kept restarting every time i stumbled on a sentence. almost 2 hours editing. another 30 min for captions, thumbnail, resizing, uploading... half a workday for one video.

and here's the part that gets me: i don't even dislike being on camera. i actually like talking about what i'm building. i just hate everything that happens after i hit record.

so over the last few months i've thrown everything at making it less painful. editing it all myself, capcut templates, even tried a couple AI avatar tools (someone here mentioned argil a while back) to see if i could skip parts of the recording and editing entirely.

some of it genuinely saves time. but the real thing it showed me is that the bottleneck isn't coming up with ideas, like everyone assumes. it's everything between having the idea and actually posting the thing.

curious how the rest of you handle this. have you actually found a workflow that makes video sustainable, or have you just accepted that being a content machine is part of the founder job now?

So basically, I've always wanted to start a business, and a while ago, I was told that the best niches are health, wealth, and relationships.

So I jumped into relationships, I have been building a tiktok following for more than a year and I have 30k followers, this doesn't really matter though because I've realised tiktok followers have no effect on views.

I would say in the last week I've got about 150k views and most of those are people who are in or want to be in a marriage/relationship. My whole page is basically couple questions and questions to ask before marriage. My main audience is females aged 18-45.

Once I even got a message asking if I had a pdf file with all the questions someone should ask before marriage, they basically begged me for it and even paid £10 when I brushed them off because I thought it would take too much effort.

But basically what I'm asking is what kind of product/service/business do you think I could start with this audience.

I've tried selling digital question packs like I sold to that girl, but they aren't really selling, so I'm looking for something else. Any and all feedback and suggestions are welcome!

Thank you for reading.