Recently, in going-global and indie development circles, a certain narrative formula has become wildly overused. To be precise, it isn't recent; it's always been around—people just keep finding new ways to put on the act.
The opening is always an inspirational script about starting from scratch, something ordinary people can replicate. Not spending a cent on paid acquisition, relying purely on organic traffic, validating the business loop in 48 hours, gaining tens of thousands of followers in a year, making hundreds of thousands of dollars.
At first, this playbook looks incredibly sexy. As you keep reading, the author's description turns into: when the account was starting, communities helped share it, big influencers helped retweet it, it was posted simultaneously in several niche paid communities of a few hundred people each, and it gained 3,000 to 5,000 followers that day.
So it turns out they call influencer retweets and private-domain mass messaging pure organic traffic.
This kind is still relatively decent—they say it openly. Most just conceal it outright. It's all "self-made," precisely hitting users with hard needs, gaining XXX followers in a single day, earning XXX per day.
Do they exist? Of course they do. If you're citing exceptions, what exceptions aren't there?
This is like someone sharing with you the business secret of starting from scratch, saying doing business is actually very simple—just set up a small stall and you can make a fortune every day. By the time you've set up your street stall, he nonchalantly tells you that on opening day the mall's general manager was his own maternal uncle, who brought all the employees to line up and show support.
The cheapest thing in the going-global circle is this illusion of information asymmetry. Those so-called 48-hour demand validations and landing pages that collect hundreds of emails are never because his landing page is so beautiful or his pain point so precisely identified; it's because he was already holding the faucet.
Newcomers have no traffic pool, and no big-influencer friends they can mobilize at any time. Following this theory to build web pages and test demand, they wait two weeks and get not a single real person except search engine spiders. In the end, they can only suspect their own abilities are lacking and exit in disappointment.
Wanting to package things up after making money is completely understandable, but taking monetization results that come with a built-in reservoir and teaching people who don't have running-water pipes how to catch water out of thin air is a bit too pretentious.