Mid-2000s, late twenties, and I got pulled into a funnel.
Blogs were taking off. Everybody had an email list and a free PDF and I wanted the free prize inside, so I signed up, and then I read the thing.
The copy was ridiculous. Overwritten, wandering, wild claims stacked on top of each other, and somewhere underneath it all there was supposedly a product. I never found it. I got to the bottom of the page still not knowing what the man was selling or what it would do for me. The whole page was hostile to the eyes, all that early web HTML.
Here’s what I’ve never said out loud about it. I wasn’t only a mark. I was studying it.
I was desperate for side income and I was trying to reverse-engineer the machine so I could run one myself. Wanting to be useful to people has never been my problem — I’ve had that my whole life. What I couldn’t do was state plainly what I was offering. So I read those pages twice, once as a customer trying to figure out what I was buying and once as a would-be builder trying to figure out how they did it.
I failed at both, because the whole thing was built to be unclear.
Twenty years on, what bothers me isn’t that grifters exist. Con men are as old as dirt.
It’s the asymmetry.
There’s a whole class of people with no business shipping a product who have every ounce of fire required to ship a product. They’re loud, they’re fast, they’re shameless, and they’re constantly in front of you.
Then there are people who actually know things. Practitioners. Most of them won’t hype and won’t promise the moon and would genuinely rather do the work than talk about the work. So they don’t ship, or they ship quietly, and nobody ever sees it.
The worst products get the distribution. The good ones die in a drafts folder.
I feel this one from the inside.
Thirteen years in Toastmasters. Distinguished Toastmaster. I’m good at getting a frightened person to the point where they can stand up in a room and be heard, and I know exactly how I’d gimmick that. I could build the lead magnet promising you’ll be the next great keynote speaker. I could write the page. I know every move.
Somebody once pitched me an eighteen-thousand-dollar speaker training program. Do programs like that have real clients? Some of them, sure. But eighteen thousand dollars with nothing they could show me up front stops feeling like a program and starts feeling like a toll booth on somebody’s hope.
So the honest version and the gimmick sit right next to each other in my head, and I know how to build both, and the gimmick would sell faster.
The line between a grifter and somebody who’s just wrong is intent, and intent leaves evidence.
Everybody’s wrong sometimes. I’ve been wrong plenty. But a person who was merely wrong pivots — corrects it, says so out loud, tries to make it right, and you can watch them do it in public.
The test isn’t whether somebody made a bad claim. It’s what they do the first time a claim doesn’t survive contact with reality. One correction is a person learning. A pattern with a direction to it is something else, and the direction is usually toward the money.
The reason this isn’t just an internet annoyance is who’s on the other end.
It’s people on the edge. Real financial trouble, something hard going on, honestly trying to pull themselves up. They’ve got something good in them and no idea how to package it so anybody would want it, and that’s a genuine and painful gap.
What they get offered is three simple steps and a miracle.
The real answer is slower. Get good at something. Build an offer somebody wants badly enough to pay for. Then go do the job you said you’d do. There’s no version where you skip the first part.
But a desperate person can’t afford to wait, so they buy the shortcut, get frustrated, and buy the next one. Every trip through leaves them a little more broke and considerably more cynical.
Now the part I’d rather not put in.
I’ve spent this whole essay describing practitioners who know things and won’t ship, as though I’m reporting on them.
I have a finished product sitting on my hard drive. It’s been finished for weeks. I haven’t priced it, haven’t built a page, haven’t asked one human being to buy it. I’ve had two books out this year and sold about thirty copies total, and I have never once directly asked anybody to purchase anything I’ve made.
I’ve been telling myself that’s integrity. That I’m the practitioner who won’t stoop to it.
That story is very comfortable and I don’t think it’s true. The loud man with the bad product and I have produced roughly the same amount of value for the person who needed help — he took their money and I never showed up. His is worse. Mine isn’t good.
If I’m honest about the fear under all of this, it was never that I’d get taken again. I’ve been taken. You survive that.
It’s that one day I’ll look at what I’ve built and find out it was all noise and no value.
Which is a fear you can only settle one way, and it isn’t by not selling.
David Willis 