[00:01] into two completely different games and most people have no idea which game this business model 5 years ago as a completely lost college kid and since always wanted. But over the past 6 months, I keep seeing the same thing
[00:16] everything right. They're running ads. They're testing products, following the working. They can't figure out why. And honestly, it took me a while to that used to work for months are dying in weeks now. But once I saw the
[00:30] pattern, it became really obvious and it's not what most people think. Now, here's the thing. Some people are in fact making this work, but most aren't. getting bigger every single day. So, in this video, I'm breaking down exactly
[00:43] forces that are changing everything right now, and what the people who figured it out are doing differently. Let me show you exactly what I mean. So, here's what you need to understand going into 2026. And I'm seeing two completely
[00:55] are stuck and people who figured it out. And here's what's wild. They're finding the exact same products, the same research methods, the same access to data, the same pretty much everything. But that's not where the split is
[01:08] happening. You found a product, Tik Tok product research tool, whatever. You test it. You run some ads. Maybe you make some sales for a couple weeks. Then a month, maybe 6 weeks later, that product is completely saturated. Margins
[01:21] it right now. And you start over. and your revenue is pretty much all over the place. 4K one month, 1K the next, maybe 6K if you hit something, then back down to zero when it dies. Now, here's the problem. You are not building anything
[01:34] really. No customer list, no supplier relationships, no brand people actually you're bleeding money away. Now, if you're on the other side, here's what's different. You picked one community, could be pet owners, new moms, new dads,
[01:47] And you're selling to that same group over and over. So when you launch scratch every single time. You've got a few thousand people on your list who already trust you. You own the relationship, email, SMS. So when you
[02:01] drop something new, you're not 100% dependent on expensive ads to people who people you can reach directly. And your revenue is predictable. You can actually look like. Your supplier relationships are getting better. Better pricing,
[02:15] faster shipping, custom product stuff you can't get when you are just randomly testing products. Here is what's wild. The gap between these two keeps growing. every month gets easier, better economics, more trust, more leverage.
[02:29] And if you didn't, every month simply gets harder. CPMs keep going up. Products keep dying faster. Competition keeps getting worse. And look, anyone can steal a product. Anyone can copy an ad, but you can't copy 6 months of
[02:42] deals. And that's when it became clear to me, this isn't about finding better products. You're playing two completely different games. One game is simply short-term. You're optimizing for this month, this product, this campaign. The
[02:55] other is long-term. You're building stuff that compounds. And most people the wrong game. So, what is causing this split? Why is product hunting dying while market serving is winning? There are four forces creating this and I'm
[03:07] with each one and exactly what the winners are doing to capitalize on it exactly how to make the switch. Let's start with the first one. All right. So, honestly, this one threw me off the most. It's that most drop shippers are
[03:20] optimizing for the completely wrong number. They're really just focused on profit per order. So, how much can I make on a sale? $30 margin, $40 margin, $50 margin. That is the goal. Maximize profit on every single transaction.
[03:34] Extract as much cash as possible and then move on to the next customer. But actually winning long-term, they're doing the exact opposite. They're making less money per sale on purpose.
[03:46] sometimes breaking even, sometimes even losing a little bit on that first this, I was like, "Wait, how does that make any sense? How do you build a business while at the same time losing money on every single sale?" But then I
[03:59] And [music] it completely flips the game upside down. They're not optimizing for profit per order. They're optimizing for customer acquisition cost because they know that if they can acquire a customer for, let's just say, $30 instead of $60,
[04:12] they can spend way more on ads, acquire more customers, and then make all their purchases. And I know that sounds a bit complicated, but you can think about it like Costco. They lose money on that $1.50 hot dog. It's literally been the
[04:25] same price for 50 years. But it's funny because they actually lose money on most that they make a majority of their revenue on memberships because once you're a member, you keep coming back month after month, year after year. That
[04:38] playing. And this isn't just Costco. You can look at the company AG1 that's been going crazy. The greens powder that over the internet, or at least I am. It's a subscription business. You pay
[04:51] $79 a month for your greens powder. That is $950 a year per customer. They're spending, you know, $2.2 $.2 million a month on a podcast advertising alone.
[05:03] that the backend works. They're okay with and they can lose money getting you in the door because they own you on the back end. Product hunters, they need $40 profit per sale just to survive. But the brands that are building moes, they'll
[05:17] break even or even lose money on that first sale because they're playing a different game. [music] The reality is they can afford to spend more on ads, test more, acquire more customers, and then they own those customers forever.
[05:29] Now, here's why this works so well in 2026 and didn't really matter as much before. In the old era, when products had much longer runways, you could make your money on that first sale and then ride your product for months. You didn't
[05:42] Now, when your products die in weeks, if you're only making money on that first transaction, you are basically screwed because you're starting over every single time. And brands on the cutting edge have figured out that they need to
[05:56] sale. And the only way to do that is to flip the economics. So, lower margin on the acquisition, higher lifetime value actually doing. They're running offers that are almost too good. So, free plus
[06:10] shipping, break even bundles, first purchase discount that barely make any money. And you could just think about how Amazon does their subscribe and save. They'll give you 15% off just to lock you into reoccurring orders. So,
[06:22] they'd rather make less money per order and own you long-term. And then the same thing when you go to a website, you'll see a pop-up. It will say 15% off your then they'll prompt you to put your phone number. In those companies,
[06:34] they're using that to build their email list, their SMS list, their customer people again and again. Second product, holiday sales, Black Friday, Christmas,
[06:46] business. The relationship is the business. Now, I give you guys another analogy. You can think about it like dating versus marriage. Product hunters, they're trying to have the best first date possible, extract maximum value,
[06:58] winners are trying to start a relationship, even if that first date costs a lot of money, because they know that the lifetime value of that here's the opportunity. If you're still optimizing for maximum profit per order,
[07:13] You need to flip your entire economics. So, ask yourself, what is the cheapest that I can acquire a customer for? What offer can I run that is so good that people can't say no even if I barely make money or break even? Then focus on
[07:28] everything on the back end. the email flows, the SMS campaigns, second product actually make your money. Because in 2026, the brands that can acquire customers the cheapest and monetize them over 6 months, 12 months, 2 years, those
[07:42] Everyone else is just fighting over scraps on that first transaction. And much because most drop shippers are focused on the wrong metric entirely. They're chasing revenue. How high can I scale this before it dies? That's their
[07:55] into Facebook ads, try and hit a 10K day, 20K day, extract as much cash as what's interesting. The brands that are actually growing long-term, they're not
[08:07] even looking at the revenue number like that. They're focused on something reinvesting that early momentum [music] into things that actually make them they don't look like every other generic drop shipping store. You just see
[08:21] creators making real organic content about their products, building out the improving the product quality and customer experience, better supplier relationships, all that stuff that makes them hard to copy. [music] Because
[08:34] in week one or week two and it ends up popping off, you're doing really well six weeks of good margins before everyone else piles in. Most people try to extract as much cash as possible in that window just to scale ads, make as
[08:49] the next product when it dies. Winners, they're taking that revenue and then reinvesting it into the packaging, into the content, into the creators, into automations, into actual product
[09:02] hits around week six, seven or eight, margins get compressed for everyone real, so it really doesn't matter and they're not going to get affected as much. They have testimonials. You just see social proof, better economics from
[09:15] supplier relationships. They're not starting over from zero. They are effectively compounding. Now, here's the thing. You can only reinvest into those modes if you catch products early enough to actually have that window. And most
[09:27] people, by the time that they figure out a product's working, it's already week four, five, maybe six. They burn through half of the good margin window. They opportunity is shrinking fast. So, the real skill isn't just finding products.
[09:40] it's catching them while there's still time and money to build the moat. That matters. All right, so let's just say that you found a product. Doesn't really you saw it on your feed, whatever. Now, the question that you need to answer is,
[09:54] am I early or are there already too many people selling this thing? And here's to want to head into the meta ad library. You search for the product or for here is how long that they've been running ads. Have they been running ads
[10:08] consistently for 2 3 weeks? That is your signal that they're making money and Now, when you go into those ads, you also want to check the comments. So, look for people building conversations, tagging their friends, sharing stories
[10:20] That's community forming around the be a good sign. The next thing is counting competitors. How many other stores are running the same product? So, you can do a Google search for that
[10:33] are selling it. Then you're going to want to check each one's ad library and see how many are actively running ads right now. So if you're seeing 10 15 ads, you are probably too late and that window is most likely closed. But if
[10:48] there's, for example, like three, four stores and they're just starting to ramp up. You might actually be early enough to get in. Now, this method works. You really solid decisions. The main thing
[11:00] is that you're working with signals. So, ad duration, comments, competitor count, testing. Now, what you don't see is the be able to see how many orders that that company is doing. Are they doing 50
[11:12] orders a day or 500 orders a day? Are there sales ramping up or are they plateauing? So, you're basically piecing it together without seeing the real data clarity. Now, it does take a bit more work. So, if you don't have time or you
[11:25] just rather speed up the process and see the actual numbers, I would recommend using a tool like this winning hunter, which I think is an absolute cheat code. And I'll make sure to leave a link below to this software and any discounts or
[11:37] just say for instance that, you know, we're interested in this brand right here called Bodily. What I can do is head over to the stores and then track tracking. All right. Right. And then it's going to direct me to the dashboard
[11:52] this store. So, like I said, you're going to have a lot more clarity. And the fact that I can see exactly how much money this company is making, guys, that's crazy. December 6, they did 15K, 406 orders, and then we can see their
[12:05] average order value, how many different products that they have, what their rank is, and then the store visits. Then, right here, we can see all the product variants. We can get an idea of what their bestselling products are, or, you
[12:17] their money on their ads. Then if I go to Facebook ads right here, it's going to show me all of their active Facebook ads. And it's going to give an ad score, whether they're scaling, uh, winning, and this is contingent on how long these
[12:29] running for 16 days, 22 days, 23 days. If you have an ad that has been running to keep the ad running for that long if find super useful for competitor research to finding other people that
[12:43] products is this magic AI search. All I have to do is screenshot the image and then drag and drop into the search. So you can do that or you can type in a keyword and it's going to populate all the ads that are selling a similar
[12:58] instance, let's look at this company right here. So it's going to direct me to the ad library of this account where I can see that they have,15 active ads. because they're running a ton of different creatives. Now we want to see
[13:13] if they're actually making money. start tracking and then as we can see they're doing $500,000 a month Australian. What I really like is that they'll start to populate all the various competitors of this said company. So it kind of makes
[13:26] you know, do your digging via the manual method like I showed earlier. We already reference. All right, so now you know how to validate timing, catch them in the margin and the time to actually
[13:40] shift that I'm seeing, and I didn't figure this out until like year four, is how most people treat content. They see it as simply a marketing expense tied to the product. The product's doing well, so they start hiring. You just see
[13:53] out content consistently. When the product dies, they cut the creators. stops completely. It is all tied to the product. And when the product's gone, essentially start over. But the brands that are playing the long game figured
[14:08] They're not treating content as an expense. They're treating it as an asset, something that builds value over time instead of disappears when the doing. They are creating content that lives beyond the product. YouTube
[14:22] channels with educational content, podcasts, building actual communities, organic social content that keeps getting found months later. And we could They've built a multi-million dollar brand almost entirely on content and
[14:36] stunts, not paid ads. Gym Shark, they got to a billion doing the same thing with athlete content and community and YouTubers, content creators. And the thing is, this content keeps working long after the product's dead. Someone
[14:49] back pain from 6 months ago, clicks through to your store, and it doesn't selling back then is gone. They're on your site now, and you own that traffic. Product hunters, they make content for the product, and when it dies in weeks,
[15:03] all that content is basically worthless. winners. They make the content for the audience and the content keeps working, keeps driving traffic for months or even years. And when products are dying every few weeks, you cannot afford to throw
[15:17] away traffic sources each time. YouTube videos, organic Tik Toks, a real regardless of what product that you're selling. And the content becomes your practically. Instead of just making product focused content that dies with
[15:32] the product, you're creating content around a problem that the product solves. So for example, we don't want to say buy this back brace. We would rather say three exercises for lower back pain with the back brace as one solution at
[15:46] the very end or the CTA. Another example might be you don't want to say this kitchen gadget is amazing, but you'd rather say how to meal prep in 20 minutes with the gadget as the necessary tool in order to make the meal prep. So,
[16:00] found on YouTube. It goes viral on TikTok and drives traffic for months on something new, you've already got content driving traffic to whatever mean by content [music] as an asset. You're building something that
[16:15] compounds. more content, more organic reach, more free traffic, more brand opportunity here is pretty straightforward. Start creating content videos that actually teach you something. Organic Tik Toks and reels
[16:28] that solve real problems. Build a community that people want to be a part of, not just product ads that disappear when the product dies. Content that free traffic long term. Because in 2026, the brands that own organic traffic and
[16:41] customer, those are the ones that survive when everyone else is fighting over the same paid ads at higher and higher CPMs. All right, the fourth thing, and most people don't even realize that this is happening. Here's
[16:53] the thing nobody is talking about. AI didn't give you an edge. It took away everybody's edge. When everyone has access to the same tools, the tools stop down on the exact thing that is making them invisible. Everyone's using Chat
[17:06] GPT for copy. same AI store builders, same AI ad generators, same product everything. So, you've literally got 10,000 stores that look identical. They Customers land on your page and they can't tell you apart from anyone else.
[17:22] You're all commoditized before you even launch. There is nothing that makes you understand, you can kind of think about it like this. It's like when everyone filters back in the day. At first, you know, it looked really cool. Then
[17:34] everybody's photos looked the same and the only people who actually stood out cameras. And unfortunately that is what's happening with AI right now and cutting edge, they figured out something different. They're using AI, but they're
[17:47] using it as a tool, not as their entire strategy. They use AI to speed things up, write drafts, create layouts, but they add the human layer on top of it. So real photos from real customers, real testimonials that don't sound like Cha
[18:02] social media when they're actually talking to people, real brand personality. And here's why this works now and didn't really matter as much before. In the previous era, before AI was everywhere, differentiation was way
[18:17] easier. You could have a decent looking store with decent copy and you would stand out because how hard it was to create a very nice store. You had to hire developers. You had to get graphic designers, the whole nine yards. But now
[18:29] AI made it so easy to create decent content that simply doesn't cut it anymore. Everyone's decent. The baseline basically just got raised. So the only way to stand out now is to add stuff that AI can't copy. And that's real
[18:42] relationships, real personalities, real authenticity. So here's what you need to do. Don't avoid AI. Use it. It's, you know, a massive timesaver, but don't let it be your entire brand. Use AI to handle all the heavy lifting and then
[18:56] add your human touch on top of it. That means reaching out to your first customers and getting real testimonials, getting real UGC content from real people using your products, writing social media captions that actually
[19:08] sound like you, not like a robot. So yeah, you can use traction, but go through it and make it sound real. Build a brand personality that feels authentic because in 2026, authenticity is the only thing that cuts through the noise.
[19:20] but not everyone can build something real. All right, so at this point, Product hunting is getting crushed from every single angle. And honestly, it's not going to get any better. But look, this is important. I'm not saying don't
[19:33] actually still the best way to get your foot in the door. If you're starting from zero right now, you need cash flow. You need to learn how ads work. You need to understand what sells. And products, they give you that. Let me just be super
[19:46] starting with product hunting. Think the problem is staying with product hunting. make some money, then they just keep doing the same thing. Find another forever, and [music] then they're in this endless loop. But the smart move is
[20:01] to use that momentum to transition. Now, here's the thing. This whole transition, figuring out your niche, building the infrastructure, making it work for your easier with someone who's done it, helping you through it. That is exactly
[20:14] why I've built my mentorship program. We work oneon-one with you wherever you are you're at zero or you've already got some traction and you want to scale past 100k plus months. I'll leave a link below if you want to chat and see if
[20:28] way, here's what matters. You find a product that works. Great. Now you've got cash flow, some customers, you know, a niche that's spending money. That is when you want to start building. So take that revenue and reinvest it into the
[20:40] infrastructure. better suppliers, custom packaging, and better product quality content that ranks a real email list so that 6 months from now, you're not just brand that your community actually recognizes. Now, look, you're not going
[20:54] brand overnight. But here's why it's worth it, though. Those early product wins, they give you cash to essentially reinvest. And every month that you reinvest, you're building something that compounds instead of resetting to zero
[21:07] every single time. So, you use the products as the launchpad. Then you actually lasts. But the people who quit, they stay on the treadmill. Six months use those early wins to build something
[21:20] real, by month six, you've actually got an asset. So here's the play. If you're currently at zero right now, start with products, get cash flow, learn the game, possibly can. And the earlier that you start building infrastructure alongside
[21:34] that, the better position that you're going to be when everyone else is still made it this far, you see it. The split's real. And once you see it, you this out six months ago, they are already building. They're already
[21:48] and everyone else is getting bigger every single week. So, if this clicked for you, drop a comment and let me know where you're currently at. Are you stuck in the cycle? Are you making the transition? I actually do read all the
[22:01] comments, believe it or not. Now, the window is still open. Most people don't you, it is closing way faster than you think. So, now that you know what's coming, you see the split happening. Don't just watch it happen. Go build
[22:13] something. Catch you in the next one. case.