The most profitable project of my life hasn’t been built yet.
My most viral post hasn’t been written yet.
I haven’t met the most wonderful person yet.
I haven’t come up with my strongest idea yet.

I believe that the best is yet to come, and that the best of the past will eventually stop being the best. That’s why I keep working on new projects, even if my current ones are at their revenue peak. I keep writing new essays, even if a recent one brought in the most readers. This helps me avoid getting attached to past successes and makes it easier to handle setbacks.

I have doubts not only while making a decision, but also after I’ve made it. I publish a post, and the next day I already want to change the wording. I put an unpromising project on hold, and a month later I want to continue working on it. I come up with a cool name for a product, register the domain, and claim the social media handles, but a week later I no longer like the name. I publish an essay, and a year later I want to delete it so no one can see it anymore.

No matter how many hours I spend thinking things through and making a decision, the doubts won’t go away. I just make decisions knowing that I may no longer agree with them in the future.

If you are planning to create an online casino or a copy of OnlyFans, you most likely want to get in quickly, make money fast, and get out. You are unlikely to stick with it for 10 years. Just as many criminals hope to pull off one last heist, earn a living, and never do it again. The idea of one last job sounds heroically romantic.

Working on an 18+ project feels like being a rock star. You work with 18+ content, see the audience, see the performers, and get access to what feels like something secret. Some see it as excitement, risk, drama, and a feeling of being alive. And then it turns out that stigma is built into almost every operational decision: hiring, advertising, payments, investments, social circle, and reputation. Stigma is the price you pay for permission to exist.

You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or lotteries. But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction. Finding investment for such projects is far harder than for conventional niches. Do you want to build an AI-powered 18+ video generator? When posting job openings, you will always have to beat around the bush, without using direct language. And only then, when the candidate has already agreed to an interview or even after it, do you tell them what kind of content they will be working with every day.

Employees join such projects for various reasons. Some realize that the pay is better than in legitimate projects. Others come because they couldn’t find a job where they wanted to, or because they are simply interested in working on something forbidden. And then a good company saving the world will come along and offer them a job, and they’ll leave. Building a stable team from people with this kind of motivation is hard.

Payment providers, including Stripe, do not work with 18+ and gambling. You will have to look for others. A regular provider charges a regular commission but will not work with you, while another will want a commission 10 times higher and will agree, but may stop working with you at any time. These are often unreliable providers who are willing to work with risky categories. Or you will have to give up payment providers altogether, accept only cryptocurrency, and set up the processing yourself, because even many crypto processors prohibit these categories. Your creatives won’t pass moderation on ad networks. Accounts will be blocked for advertising prohibited projects. You need constant account warming, proxies, anti-detect browsers, moderation bypasses, and cycling through accounts. All of this takes a lot of time and money. Venture investors refuse to fund such projects, so they are often financed with personal money or money from friends. There are few who want to hedge their portfolio or just dabble in this space because it gets their blood pumping too.

Formal rules and legal protection mechanisms, which are common in legitimate projects, do not work well here. Many companies in these areas are not registered at all. They operate through nominees, without an office, without official salaries, and without paying taxes. When the business itself is illegal, the courts and police no longer seem like a natural means of protection. So competitors resort to spam, DDoS attacks, data leaks, hacking, fake reviews, and reputation damage. If your company also operates unofficially and your competitors want to eliminate you, they will not be able to do so officially and will look for other ways. And they may find them.

This kind of business can’t make you proud if you’re not in an environment that appreciates it. If all your friends go to church on Sundays or your wife is an elementary school teacher, they’re not likely to approve of a webcam studio business. Your other half will feel uncomfortable talking about what you do. She won’t talk about it with her friends or at work parties. This will constantly weigh on you, even if you don’t notice it at first. Your religion or the religion of those around you may also disapprove. Life is not what happens to you, but what you are able to talk about. But if the product becomes successful, how will you talk about it to your friends? If you built the best casino site, it feels like you are participating in the decay of society and are proud of it.

Or you have a traffic arbitrage project: you buy traffic on Google and use cloaking to direct it to casino sites via referral links. You find an excuse: if it weren’t for you, someone else would be doing it. You’re not stealing money from a card, you’re just connecting a Google search to a casino site, and then the person loses tens of thousands of dollars themselves. You don’t force the person to make a deposit, you don’t take money from their card, you don’t gamble their money away. It’s like you’re not to blame. People gamble at casinos, but society shifts the blame onto those who build a business on it. When a person tries to find excuses for their actions, it means they feel uncomfortable but keep going. In niches without stigma, such rationalizations are unnecessary.

Success in a stigmatized niche rarely translates into reputation beyond it. You’ve built a product with a million users, but you can’t always add this project to LinkedIn without damaging your reputation. You spent 5 years, achieved significant revenue, somehow assembled a team and pay them well above market rates so that people don’t leave for a more legitimate project, made contacts in related projects, analyzed your competitors, and know this market well. And the better you made the product, the more you are tied to a niche that is difficult to leave.

You can ask AI to think and plan, for example, to draw up a marketing plan for a project. And it will “think” and compose a beautiful text with arguments, breaking the plan down into stages, phases, periods, and categories. But this plan will have nothing to do with reality.

Build a 7-year growth roadmap for my project

Phase 1 (0-6 months): launch, first 100 users from personal network and early adopters
Phase 2 (6-12 months): organic growth, 500-1,000 users, early feedback and product iterations
Phase 3 (1-2 years): product-market fit, 3-5K users, introduce paid acquisition channels
Phase 4 (2-4 years): scaling, 10-30K users, achieve sustainable revenue
Phase 5 (4-7 years): maturity, 50-100K users, expand into adjacent markets and segments

How many downloads will my app get after launch?

Pessimistic: 100-500 in the first month
Realistic: 1,000-3,000 in the first month
Optimistic: 10,000+ in the first month

How do I attract the first users to my product?

1. Create an account on Twitter/X and start posting build-in-public content
2. Write an article on Hacker News
3. Launch on Product Hunt
4. Start a free newsletter with valuable content
5. Find 10 relevant communities on Reddit and become an active participant

These answers are equally useless. Even if you provide him with the context of the project and the decisions made earlier, he still won’t be able to think. He will only write a plausible plan. In reality, you’ll find that posts on HN rarely make it to the front page, there is no one to send the newsletter to, X hardly ever generates clicks on external links, and Reddit bans self-promotion.

He can convince you that your startup is definitely a blue ocean and your key feature is your product-market fit. But the future is stochastic. AI models cannot predict it. His pessimistic predictions are never zero. Most likely because the training data in such predictions most often does not have zero. Although if you ask him, “But there could be zero users in a year, right?”, he will agree with that. His predictions are just another way of saying “I don’t know”.

Planning with AI is almost no different from planning by an incompetent person. A person without AI can draw up the same plan. But in most cases, whether it’s planned by a person or AI, the plan will not survive the collision with reality. People have always passed off plausible text about the future as forecasts. AI has simply accelerated this. Previously, it was expensive and time-consuming, so it seemed valuable. Now AI generates the same plausible plan in 10 seconds, and it becomes clear that the emperor has no clothes.

I live without discipline, schedules, timetables, or daily routines. I don’t have a to-do list for tomorrow or next week. I might sleep during the day one month and at night the next. Today I’m working on one project, tomorrow I’ll switch to another. I’m not tied to the days of the week or the time of day. For me, Tuesday is no different from Saturday, day is no different from night, and one month is no different from another. At the same time, I work 10 hours every day.

I don’t plan events or keep a calendar. If meetings are booked weeks in advance for a specific time slot, they’re not my meetings. If the job requires mandatory scheduled calls, it’s not my job. At the same time, I do long-term projects that stretch over years.

I don’t have goals with deadlines and quantitative metrics, but I do have plans and directions. I don’t have a task to “release a feature by the end of the week”, but I do have a direction towards “developing the product”. I don’t have a goal to “earn a fixed amount per year”, but I do have a direction towards “increasing my income”.