<
https://www.404media.co/how-i-bought-a-private-jet-by-selling-10-subscriptions-to-404-media/>
"Sitting on a white leather recliner on my private jet, I needed to decide how
many millions of dollars to give myself, a process that was less about thinking
and more about how many times to hit random number keys on my keyboard. I
watched
404 Media’s revenue graph go up and to the right.
I clicked record on my camera, wanting to show my followers how hard I work,
even when I’m getting shuttled off to exotic locations. “We’re here on the PJ,
off to Ibiza. Got the passport, got the prosecco. We’re hustling. 404media.co,”
I say. “You want to get rich? Publish journalism on the internet. I just
published something.”
Because I’d sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of subscriptions today
alone, I wanted to show my followers just how quickly I’d been making money. I
opened the Stripe app on my phone and decided how many subscriptions I wanted
to sell. I used a slider bar—again, somewhat at random—to select 164 new
subscribers, spaced out every .5 seconds. I clicked a button that said “Start
Burst.” Notifications begin streaming across my phone’s Lock Screen. I hold it
up to the camera.
“Let me show you how easy it is. Just published,” I say, holding my phone up to
the camera. “New Payment from Stripe,” the notifications read. “You received a
payment of $100 from
rachel.thompson@gmail.com,” one says. Then John Wright
subscribes. Then Megan Johnson. Then Daniel Thomas. Honestly, I can’t keep up.
“Ten dollars, ten dollars, a hundred dollars a hundred dollars,” I say,
pointing at the phone. “Take my easy course online, learn how to become rich
like us.”
“Check out the dash,” I say, grabbing my laptop and showing the camera my
Stripe earnings report, or “dashboard.” “This is from today only. $51,000
gross, $2.7 million so far this year. It’s easy. Take my online course, join
the community, I’ll show you how to be rich.”
I stop recording. In reality, I was sitting alone in photo studio Olympic 4,
inside a warehouse jammed between the 5 freeway, a railway for cargo trains,
and the largely dry, concrete Los Angeles River. Moments earlier I called a
receptionist because the code for my one-hour rental ($65) wasn’t working. I
didn’t even have the keys to my fake, indoor private jet. I had to stop
recording because my voice inside the private jet was overpowered first by a
power saw outside, then by an ambulance siren. My subscribers, my Stripe
dashboard, my notifications were all fake of course. My prosecco was real; I
bought it at Ralph’s for a party a few months ago on sale for $6. It didn’t
matter. I was LARPing. It was going well. Buy my course."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
