midwestern moms are quietly making $20K a month posting about vacuums on tiktok shop.
here's everything from this week:
upwork and fiverr are officially cooked. tom is testing 2 products a day right now — claude code spins up 90 landing pages, each product gets $100/day on CBO with AI ads, and he just checks the metrics. CAC, add-to-cart ratio, CPC. found a winner, didn't like the conversion, rebuilt the entire site in 10 minutes. his productivity went up 10x and his cost to test dropped 95-99%. the upwork guy he used to pay a few hundred bucks and wait three days for? gone. fiverr stock is getting hammered for exactly this reason.
longevity is the most underrated moat in business. tom learned this the hard way — he had a massive moat in the FBA space from years of content, reviews, and success stories. partnered with a TikTok shop course creator who had no reputation, launched the offer, and it was crickets. cold traffic was impossible to convert. all those years of podcasts and YouTube videos he took for granted were the actual flywheel: more reviews → better ad conversion → more students → more success stories → repeat. you can't shortcut it.
tiktok shop is the next gold rush and the model is basically a one-level MLM. brands gift product to thousands of affiliates, pay them per video or per view, gamify it so the top creator of the month wins a lamborghini. shark — a boring vacuum company that's been around forever — is absolutely crushing it with midwestern moms making POV videos. tony's insight: with 5,000 people posting the same keywords daily, the tiktok algo floods every concentric circle of influence until it feels like the whole world is talking about your product. it's running a sales team — you train them, motivate them, put the one mom who made $20K on a pedestal, and the content compounds.
the spacex saga continued. jacky put $100K in, felt the exact same chemicals as gambling, couldn't get any work done for two days just staring at it, cashed out day one up ~$8-9K realized. tony diamond-handing, set sell limits at 182/198/215/225, then canceled them and only got stopped out on one level. classic. tom bought right before close and it immediately dropped 5%. cramer showed it too — "better version of tom." the inverse indicator system remains undefeated.
jacky's stealth consumer product hit a wall. all the profit is from SEO, and he's been burning that profitable traffic to bankroll ads at a $100 CPA while LTV sits at $32. spending $1-2K/day. tom says it's a product issue — if people use it twice and leave, the product sucks. tony says it's the industry and the fix is selling lifetime subscriptions, because value is highest at the moment of transaction. the real answer: build a habit loop and attach it to an existing daily ritual. pushing annual already raised LTV 30-40%.
fable 5 got pulled and the real reason is wild. jacky said using it was night-and-day vs opus — one-shots everything, doesn't hallucinate, checks its own work. then it got shut down. the story going around: fable is the guardrailed version of mythos, and some amazon execs claimed they jailbroke the guardrails to get access to raw mythos — a security threat. it's an AI arms race with china now. funny part: tom's friend in shanghai says nobody in china even uses chinese models. everyone's on chatgpt and claude. the chinese open source models are good — kimi, GLM 5.2, all distilled from opus — but the bleeding edge is still american.
bonus: the most bullish 10 minutes of the pod. tony's "private chef vs uber eats" framing for AI abundance is elite — every luxury the elites had eventually trickles down as more energy enters the system. private chefs became uber eats, computers used to be rooms full of humans, private drivers became uber. ten years out, flying commercial might feel like riding the bus and space travel becomes the new first class. meanwhile jacky's trying to explain this to anti-AI friends at lunch and getting nowhere.
ep 8 of NGMI with @itstonyyu and @tomwang24
special shoutout to agent a by ahrefs, our sponsor for the eps!
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