…had 47 browser tabs open like she was re-creating the matrix.
Eyes half shut. Posture of someone who’d been clinically dead for twenty minutes and just decided to come back because her coffee wasn’t finished yet.
Hair doing something ambitious. The laptop was practically breathing harder than she was.
“Rough day?”
“No. This is Tuesday.”
“What do you do?”
“I sell screenshots.”
Long pause. The type of pause where your left eye starts to twitch and your brain reboots…
“Screenshots… of what?”
“Ads.”
“You sell. Pictures. Of advertisements.”
“$37 a month. Updated every Tuesday.”
She turned the laptop around.
1,247 active subscribers.
$46,139 per month.
Selling screenshots.
My entire belief system left my body.
“Hold on. Where do you even get them?”
“Facebook Ad Library. Completely free. Public. I spend two hours scrolling and screenshot anything that’s been running longer than three weeks.”
“Why three weeks?”
“Because if an ad is still running after three weeks, it’s printing money. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that’s losing. The platform is doing the quality control for me. I’m just taking the receipt.”
“So your entire product… is screenshots you find for free on a website anyone can access?”
“Google Drive folder. 50 fresh ads every Tuesday. One sentence per screenshot explaining why it works. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”
“And people hand you $37 a month for that?”
She took a sip of her coffee.
“People hand me $37 a month to skip the two hours of scrolling they’ll never do. Time saved in the long run.”
“What’s your background? Marketing degree? Agency?”
“Receptionist. Got laid off eleven months ago.”
Eleven. Months.
Receptionist to $46K a month. Selling screenshots she finds on a free website, organised in a Google Drive folder a twelve year old could build.
“But… can’t people just do this themselves?”
She shrugged the way someone shrugs when they’ve heard this exact question 400 times and it gets funnier every single time.
“Can. Won’t. Different problem entirely.”
She picked up her coffee, turned the laptop back around, and disappeared into her 47 tabs like nothing had happened…
Now someone sent me this tale fresh off the LinkedIn bus. I re-wrote it a little to make it read better, cause people on LI are AI’d up to their nostrils.
Anyways. The lesson here is:
Simple is good and simple is profitable and in this chicks case. Very profitable.
While everyone is still gargling on the shiny metal balls of our future AI overlords. People who know people. Know that people are lazy shits.
As much as the techbros are force feeding that AI is going to take over everything. They forget that the majority of people don’t want to learn a new tool (Which is also very shit in light of new events) to then have to waste time to figure it out to do what they really need. They’d rather pay for what it is they’re looking for and be given it all down and dirty like…
Just like the people paying $37 a month for winning ads they can model.
Oh and guess what? This kind of thing is so easy to set up. You don’t need a blood sacrifice to finish it.
So think about it. What can you set up that’ll print money and make people’s lives easier?
Stephen Walker.
P.S. I’ll be throwing together a little doc that I’ll slide into The Escape Hatch