I had coffee with a guy who was drop shipping jade face rollers he’d never used. Bought them on Alibaba for $1.20, sold them on Shopify for $29.99. He never talked to a single customer. Five months in, he was $800 in the hole. I bought him another coffee because I genuinely didn’t know what else to do.
He’s my go-to example of what went wrong with how an entire generation thinks about work and money. Somewhere between 2015 and 2022, “passive income” stopped being a boring financial planning term and became a salvation narrative. The rapture was the day your income exceeded your expenses and you could quit your job forever. The people making actual money were the ones selling courses about making passive income. It was an ouroboros that had incorporated in Delaware.
Between 2019 and 2021, roughly 700,000 new Shopify stores opened. About 90% failed within their first year. We started drowning in drop shipping stores with six week shipping times, affiliate blogs reviewing products the authors had never touched, and courses about courses about courses. An entire layer of the internet that was nothing but confident-sounding garbage produced by people who had optimized for everything except making something worth buying.
I want to talk about how the passive income movement broke Google, wasted the best years of a generation of would-be entrepreneurs, and why the only thing that actually works is the boring thing: find a real problem, solve it for real people, and keep showing up…
