There’s no money in it

The coronavirus world must be creating desperation because multiple guys have, independently, been asking why I don’t sell the book or hawk coaching, and I think the subtext is, they’re thinking about giving book selling or coaching a go. I’m not opposed to other guys doing either, but from what I can tell almost no one is making money from books or coaching, and in my view most guys are better off going to coding school or learning a skilled trade, depending on their underlying IQ, because those are the fields where the money is… go where the money is, not where it isn’t. If you doubt being a skilled tradesman has some money involved, call a plumber or electrician, or a general contractor, and get some bids/estimates.

Compared to a real job, I don’t think I can make real money selling books, and I’m not convinced any one is making real money at game coaching. Maybe Tom Torero and/or Krauser did at one point, or do, but Krauser in particular has written exceptional material over many years. For me, sex clubs + game is niche within niche… they’re both niche, and don’t have, from what I can see, a larger addressable market… I also think most guys don’t (really, actually) care much about getting laid. Or they don’t care enough to become effective at getting laid. If they did, their lives would be different. At any given moment, a tiny number of guys are really improving their lives and getting laid… the rest are watching TV, playing video games, on social media (with nothing to show on their social medias cause their lives are boring), etc. etc.

Me trying to make money from the book, or from a memoir (I appreciate the encouragement, don’t get me wrong), is like a young girl thinking she can make real money in pr0n. She probably can’t, though she can go through the industry wringer for a couple months, and in the process destroy her real-world reputation. Smart girls, meanwhile, are becoming nurses or teachers, where the pay and hours aren’t bad and the work’s not too hard. Maybe it makes sense for a pretty girl to do some light escorting while she’s becoming a nurse or teacher, because that’s conveniently deniable later on. She can leverage her youth and hotness with minimal reputation damage.

Smart people figure out effective things to do, dumb people don’t. I may not be a genius but I’m oriented towards effectiveness. I don’t think there’s enough money in books, courses, or coaching to make doing something like coaching, in particular, worthwhile. I’ve been reading and following aspects of pickup and game for a long time, and most of the guys I’ve seen do coaching I’d be wary of letting manage a sandwich shop, let alone them being the kind of guys I’d want to take dating or sex advice from.

There are a number of career/finance posts scattered amid the moral carnage of this blog, like Don’t end the week with nothing, and I’ll offer that advice when I see it, but the best advice is almost always hard to implement and takes many years to pay off. It’s almost always targeted to the person receiving it. Since I don’t know you, I don’t know what you most need. Coaching can rapidly improve someone’s skills, and if you want coaching, get it from Red Pill Dad.Things like, “Develop skills no one else has,” “Spend less money than you need to and invest in index funds,” “concentrate on specialized opportunities no one else has heard of.” Those kinds of things… school, despite all the bullshit and fakery involved in many aspects of modern schooling, works because at the end of the process, people who study challenging, important technical subjects come out with knowledge and mastery that almost no one else has. Many people study rudimentary business subjects that can be learned in four months, not four years, I don’t deny it, and some waste their time… but if you focus on learning hard subjects, and then you apply what you learn, you will probably do well.

I either want to do something with relatively little competition and lots of financial upside… or I want to skip the attempts to monetize and do the thing for the sake of it, and you see the fruits of that philosophy here… high competition, low probable income fields are stupid… and that is what most game coaching / mentoring / whatevering looks like to me… if you’ve read a decent chunk of The Red Quest, you have realized that it’s about me exploiting a particular market inefficiency that I’ve noticed that most other guys haven’t.

They haven’t noticed it, or they’re not capable of exploiting it. 10 – 12 years ago, online dating was poorly exploited by most guys, from what I could tell and what I experienced, and for that reason it worked pretty effectively… today, that online dating market is difficult, but the sex club market is probably not being exploited properly, and it has a barrier to entry in the form of the guy needing one hot girl for table stakes. It will not work without that ante. I can get the ante, unlike most guys.

Notice my line of thinking: market inefficiency? Time to exploit it. Writing books about game, and/or doing game coaching, looks like an efficient, difficult market to me. No thanks.

GIVING the sex club + non-monogamy book away, it has gotten fewer than 10,000 downloads (some of those are likely dupes too). If 1,000 guys bought it for $3 each (unlikely) it would still not be worth the hassle of getting the cover right, formatting right, etc. More likely I’d pour some more hours in it and get little in return. And with lower overall influence. It’s true that most guys can’t be helped… but there are a few out there who can be… and I am speaking to them, not generation r^tard, aka generation YouTube. Out of vanity I wrote a novel about pickup and non-monogamy, and that process has also convinced me writing books is a poor use of time, apart from vanity.

I did an Amazon referral thing… and, although I’m not doing real analytics, I think fewer than 1% of guys who click Amazon links to books from Red Quest buy those books. Books are simply not a good way to make money. Most people are too cheap and inept to really want to improve their lives… think of your friends (you have them, right…?), and how many of them are really working on their lives…? Books are a decent first cut to gauge whether someone is serious about improving.

With a very small number of exceptions, most of the guys selling stuff related to red pill / dating / coaching seem desperate and incompetent. Given how little money seems to be available, that makes sense. Competent guys look at a market and try to go where the money is… and it is not here. Not only is it not here, but you are competing with free Reddit, blogs, etc. Good luck with that. There are a few exceptions… I think Krauser’s books are good, Red Pill Dad or Andy from Kill Your Inner Loser are worth hiring… there are probably others I’m forgetting or don’t know about… but I have seen some rough and ugly pitches. That’s the majority.

I have wondered if a guy could combine personal training with game coaching, or if a guy could get a therapy license and then specialize in trying to red-pill men… those things seem more likely to me… but also (no coincidence here) much more work. There is a fellow on Reddit who has the name GayLubeOil who is trying to get personal training clients from Reddit Red Pill. No idea whether he’s successful, and I don’t think personal trainers need a license, though I do think men’s therapy and black-iron lifting should be combined… one session on the couch, the next session with the hex bar, sweating it out while your therapist screams at you to do another f**king set… now THAT would be effective. I don’t think I’ve ever met a buff therapist.

Some guys in their 20s are probably well-positioned to run a game coaching and development business for a few years. At that age, it’s easy to do something for a while, and then disavow it later as needed (“I was going through a phase then” is something people will be from someone who was 23). The smart guys who did some pickup coaching and commentary early on shifted away from it later in their lives… Mark Manson, Wayne Elise (used to be known as “Juggler”), the Charisma on Command guy, the The Art of Charm guy.

I also like an old-school, free-speech and open-source mindset… the kind of mindset that has largely disappeared in the locked-down cellphone era. Today, most people, especially the young, rely exclusively on locked-down smartphones and proprietary technologies, as well as proprietary ideas, and they demand that daddy government step in to tell them what to think, even while rejecting their own literal fathers as inadequate. It’s a sad state of affairs but a few of us still value independence, freedom, and not always/relentlessly being driven by market logic and government oversight.

You may notice, there are deeper lessons / ideas here, than just “chasing money from this field is bad.” Money is good. Experience is best. Life is hard.