FanSites and the wilderness

This is the stretch most founders quietly leave out. I am leaving it in.

The agency wound down in mid-2023 and there was no cushion underneath it. I had debt, no salary, and exactly one marketable skill, which is that I can build a thing and then sell it.

So I built websites and link pages for OnlyFans creators. Three or four clients, plus the marketing for one of the most famous performers in the industry.

Then came a genuinely desperate stretch where I sold around 100 websites to escorts in a matter of months. Their existing sites were a decade out of date, most of them still running on technology the internet had already abandoned. I gave them sliders, video backgrounds, layouts that worked on a phone. Roughly a sale a day.

I want the work on the record, not just the customer. Those were good websites. The instinct in a paragraph like this one is to apologize for who was paying and quietly skip whether the product was any good, and I am not doing that. It was real work, done well, for people who had been underserved by every designer who would not take their call.

Then I ran an OnlyFans management agency. It netted me about $1,000 for more than 1,000 hours of work.

A dollar an hour. I hold a first-place finish out of 97,511 freelancers and I once worked the better part of a year for a dollar an hour.

The lesson is not that the market was beneath me. The lesson is that I chose ventures by what was in front of me instead of by what I actually valued, and ventures picked that way take your years and pay you back in experience.

Which, to be fair, they did. I can build almost anything for almost anyone now, and I know exactly what I will not build again. Breadth bought with years.

I would rather hand you the receipts than the edited version. The edited version is how people end up believing this is easy.