TikTok videos showing piles of quarters make laundromats look like easy passive-income machines.
Surprise, surprise. They're not.
Carlos Ochoa ("Laundromat Money," 2M TikTok followers) helped popularize the trend five years ago.
Now the WSJ is reporting on the less glamorous reality.
Here's my theory:
By the time everyone is selling courses on how to make money in an industry, the easiest money is probably being made by the people selling the courses.
I wouldn't be surprised if laundromat influencers make more than actual laundromat owners.
What other industries have this fake "passive income" vibe?
Everyone is fighting over the same ad inventory on Google, Meta, and LinkedIn.
Meanwhile, these 10 platforms are flying under the radar:
1. Reddit Ads (Niche communities)
2. Quora Ads (Problem-aware buyers)
3. Carbon Ads (Devs, designers)
4. Telegram Ads (Niche communities)
5. Pinterest Ads (Shoppers, DIY)
6. Nextdoor Ads (Local homeowners)
7. Microsoft Ads (Professionals, B2B)
8. Product Hunt Ads (Founders, SaaS)
9. Stack Overflow Ads (Devs)
10. beehiiv/kit newsletter sponsorships
Less obvious doesn't always mean cheaper, but niche audiences can outperform massive ones.
Where are you finding underrated ad opportunities?
I live in the Very Good tier.
Varna, Bulgaria is decent for sure, but in the last few years the winters are a bit cold for my taste.
Summers are very nice and not hot like in other parts of the country 30-32C max.
Europe's best climates and where to find them, updated.
Calabria FTW, Sicily not so much... Cyprus is surprisingly out because of very hot summers. Madeira and the Canary Islands remain near perfect, of course.
This is the accurate data, with stricter parameters. Apologies for the mix-up: I was on mobile all day and crossed the order of the maps. I meant to publish a comparative 2000-2020-2050.
Not too bad, but still, this is the one truly on point
Legend.
Chinese bride gifts her partner a flagship GPU at wedding — he breaks down in tears
She handed him an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 that costs around $12,000
In an ideal agentic shopping world, ads will become obsolete.
Agents don't need ads, they need data. They don't care about catchy slogans, celebrity endorsements, or emotional storytelling.
They compare prices, specs, reviews, availability, and actual value. You can't persuade an AI agent with a flashy banner.
The winners will be companies with the best products, pricing, and machine-readable data, not the biggest ad budgets.
On the other hand, ads probably won't disappear entirely. Brands will try to influence the data and recommendations agents rely on. That's arguably the more interesting battle ahead.
As agentic shopping expands, what will stop companies from telling their agents to click all competitor ads while they are helping with shopping or choosing a service? I hope the ad platforms are ready for an onslaught of ad fraud. Just thinking out loud. :) I'm sure @AnthonyHigman has thought about this already.
Pieter is right. Latest YC batch is mostly AI stuff.
In a similar scramble I did to jump on AI in late 2022 (moving from remote work and nomads to AI apps), I am now scrambling to chase any remaining moats
As AI companies will suck up everything else (in my humble opinion)
So for every moat left I see where I can pivot towards to that with my sites/apps
Proprietary data or content:
- I launched a nomads.com paid data API for companies from $2,490/year to $9,990/year, the city data is great because it's made by real members who for example review/like/dislike a city after visiting it, or being able to see which places are growing or shrinking (interesting of real estate, coworking, or gym investors)
- hoodmaps.com neighborhood data is very valuable and I'm building a paid API for that too, as well as including it in the Nomads API
Network effects / community:
- I made the nomads.com community free (before $99, now just $1 to avoid spam), the more people, the more network effect
Audience / distribution: you can get attention on demand
- I have an @X audience and I get paid well for it (about ~$15K/mo), but I've also diversified that with my blog levels.io's email list and Telegram subscribers, which is now 187,279 people who get daily/weekly/monthly email digests of my posts
Physical component: hardware, locations, IRL:
- I have been improving and promoting nomads.com meetups, there's now 8 meetups planned in the next 30 days, but is has to keep growing, I've also added fitness meetups etc.
- I've been using and working on hotelist.com a lot and improving it, it seems to fill a real void in booking sites that all suffer from rating inflation and filters that are not modern, I'm adding features I want and it seems that's working. Today I'm adding a filter for Longevity Hotels, that have a strength training gym, wellness area, blackout curtains, as a counter balance to the boomer hotels with champagne on check in and a gym with only treadmills etc. Hotelist is fundamentally IRL because hotels are IRL
- Not really IRL but vibejam.com is an annual event that's every year has ~1000 people participating vibe coding games and this year had over 1 million people playing the games, and AI companies really like to sponsor it because it's a great way to get exposure for their AI building tools
- I am building a pieter.com 1990s retro PC mini remake, like the SNES Mini, or the ModRetro M64, a hardware product I can sell marketed for nostalgia, especially after the last few weeks where it took off finally, I think there could be some market, and hardware is fun to try
- I sell merch on levelsio.com and make about $1K/mo from it, I haven't been very active on it but could expand this if I want
Capital: owning assets and investing
- I was already heavily invested in AI companies but have been even more with the acquisition of Cursor giving me $SPCX stock, I'll hold on to that, I think money will keep getting sucked from the traditional economy and replaced with paying AI companies money
- As a hedge, I've also put more money in bonds with IB01 ETF in case the AI bubble pops, $IB01 is a nice simple ETF for that
- I am actively looking at buying more land and real estate (especially coastal) as that's a scarce asset that will remain scarce post-AGI
- I am actively investing in startups with levels.vc although I'm wondering what startups are still valuable to invest in as Big AI and Big Tech suck up everything, if you look at the last YC batch, it's all "Cursor for {industry}" harnesses and hardware, I think robotics could be interesting to invest but it's unclear who will be the winner as ironically robots have a low barrier to entry. Most robots are just Chinese-made components put together with some vibe coded software by their Western founders!
- I am open to buyers for photoai.com and interiorai.com to increase the amount of capital I can invest elsewhere
Regulatory: licenses and legal barriers
- I am bad at this, and don't like regulation by nature. So I don't have anything here. And I don't think I will try pursue anything in here. I have friends building apps that work on getting EU subsidies or EU government program credits for emissions etc. But it's not my thing
So yes, chasing moats it is! Let's see if it works
Hey @ChronopostSAV can you help me with a lost delivery?
It's an order I made on Amazon Germany. Tracking ID they provided is weird and according to it the item has been delivered to another country and to another receiver.
Apparently, nobody at Amazon Germany can explain why a €600 mini PC ordered for delivery to Bulgaria ended up being collected by someone in Lithuania.
Multiple support chats. Multiple refund refusals. Zero answers.
I think this will be my last order from @amazonDE
Hey @amazonDE,
I ordered a €600 PC for delivery to Bulgaria.
Amazon says it was delivered and refuses to refund me.
Here's the problem:
The tracking shows it was delivered to a parcel locker in Lithuania, under the name of a person I've never heard of.
Your support keeps insisting that I or someone in my household collected it.
How could I have collected a package in another country?
I've contacted support multiple times, but nobody will investigate the obvious discrepancy.
Who at Amazon can escalate this beyond frontline customer service?
Confession: I buy domains like other people buy books they never read.
dots.site was supposed to be my AI agent project. I had the name, the idea, the excitement.
Then life happened. Reddit clients, books, newsletters, a subreddit with 40K people, you name it.
The domain just sat there. Waiting.
I’d rather someone build something real on it than let it collect dust in my registrar.
If you’re building in AI and the name clicks for you, DM me. I’ll make it easy. 🤝




















