Life Math Money Turns 8 Years Old: Lessons From The Content Business

It’s been 8 years since the inception of Life Math Money. Can you believe that 8 years have gone by?

For me, the day I published the first LMM article feels like yesterday. At the same time, it feels like a lifetime away.

In the last 8 years, I got married, I had children, I built many businesses, I sold and shut many businesses, got a self-taught degree in computer science, made some new friends, lost almost an entire generation of family, lost some friends, and even nearly lost my damn life a few times.

This website has helped tens of thousands of people make money from the internet, and helped countless men get fitter, lose fat, live longer, navigate their social lives, deal with women better, get laid more often, etc.

Basically, if you read and executed the advice on here, your entire life trajectory changed. There is no doubt about it and I have the receipts.

There are men who will swear by it, and I have emails from guys who decided not to commit suicide because they read my work and saw the path to an improved life.

The True Rewards of Writing

In many ways, this sort of work (writing online for free) is extremely rewarding because you directly get to help countless people. You change their entire life, often in ways they do not even realize.

You help a guy lose weight, and this means that he will live longer. Instead of dying at 60, he might die at 70.

That’s 10 more years with his grandkids. What’s the value of time with your family?

You help a guy make money from the internet. Instead of being a wage slave all his life, he now makes money in his sleep and has the freedom to travel, and do whatever he wants, and say whatever he wants, and wear whatever he wants.

He does not have to tailor his clothing, his opinions, and his entire life to the whims of his employers. What is the value of freedom?

You help a guy get better with women. He becomes more confident and lives a more fulfilled life than he otherwise would masturbating to pornography and being married to a hag who won’t have sex with him.

What is the value of living a sexually fulfilled life? Just look at the guys who rarely if ever get laid, and you’ll have your answer.

Things like this are the true rewards of writing.

The First Lesson From The Content Business

You have to actually help people if you want to build a readership. If you are not helping people, what are you even doing? What is even the point then?

In the long run, if you don’t help people, you will have 0 readership because no one has any reason to come back to your website.

They might find you, read 1 article, and move on with their lives.

You want people to get results, so they remember your website and come back to it to get even more results.

The Money

The money is OK. I have other businesses that make me far more for every unit of energy and time I invest in them. After all, you aren’t paying me to read these articles. It’s all free.

This blog does ~$250k a year, which is not great, but not bad.

I could easily make 5x more by putting it up on Substack and paywalling the articles (they’ve reached out to me a few times), but I don’t need the money and I want my content to stay free.

LMM’s goal is about helping young men get more from their lives. Sending the elevator back down. Telling you everything I wish I knew when I was 20. I had to figure out all this stuff by myself, but you don’t have to.

I have paid products on Gumroad, and this year I launched a few books on Amazon. Every sale is welcome, and if you are a customer, I want to thank you for supporting the project.

What I can tell you is that when I make any product, I make sure that it delivers more than what I promise.

This is why I have thousands of 5 star reviews for my products.

This is why people spend time to make text and video reviews for my products.

This is why I can offer 6 month long money back guarantees. Because I know you won’t use them.

My philosophy is to deliver maximum value in both my free and paid work. For example, my free series on nutrition will teach you more about nutrition than 99% of books and courses on nutrition.

When people buy a digital product from a random person on the internet, they are usually disappointed. When people buy an LMM product, they are delighted.

They leave me good reviews, which helps me sell more high quality products, and the cycle of virtue continues.

The Second Lesson From The Content Business

Both your FREE and PAID content have to be REALLY GOOD. It must overdeliver on your promises. People should feel like god did them a favor by letting them find your work. Anything you create (free or paid), should delight people.

When someone reads a free article or watches a video from you, they should have gotten their time’s worth. When someone pays for a product from you, they should have gotten at least 10x their money’s worth. If you’re not delivering 10x value, you are failing, even if you do not realize it.

If you can deliver 10x value in both your free and paid content, the sales will eventually come. There are few humans who are so miserly that they will read you for weeks and months but will not even want to send some money your way.

If you’re actually delivering the value, them not getting your paid products is ironically their own loss anyway. For example, there are bound to be some readers who do not have a copy of Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program.

If they are overweight, indisciplined, under-muscled, procrastinate, or have bad emotional control… guess what? They’re already paying for it.

If you have a business but you haven’t read The Art of Copywriting… guess what? You’re already paying for it with all the extra sales you missed out on that you could have gotten with better copy.

That’s the type of content you want with anything you create. The rational decision for people should be to read your work, buy your products, etc. By not doing so, they’re losing value.

Multiple Streams of Income

Income from LMM is a small fraction of my income. I have many other businesses including my affiliate marketing firm and my tax/law firm.

This allows me to write what I truly think without having to:

1. Hopping on trends to make money
2. Saying things only to appease people and make sales
3. Saying something that might make me lose followers and sales
4. Working with people I do not like just so that I can make some money
5. Promoting products I don’t give a shit about just to add to my income (I get offers from companies to promote their products for money multiple times a week)
6. Etc.

If I primarily cared about money, you would see a ton of marketing in my content. There would be clickbank and shareasale links everywhere. Every post would be a marketing post.

Because I do not depend on LMM to have money to live, I am able to keep my work ethical and high quality.

Less than 10% of my content is marketing anything, and the only affiliate links on this website are products I actually like and trust.

For example, I wrote a review for 100 Mental Models by Wisdom Theory. Because I like the product.

Interestingly, Wisdom Theory got his start from The Art of X and has made hundreds of thousands of dollars from it. 6 months ago, he announced that he’s made 10,000+ sales of his product that costs $100. You can do the math yourself.

The LMM promise: I only make money by honorable means.

This means: I sell products I am proud of, I don’t promote shit I don’t personally like just to get a commission, I don’t skip payments to our affiliates, I will not charge you for something after you cancel, etc.

The Third Lesson From The Content Business

You gotta have multiple streams of income. You must not depend on your creator income to survive. You must be free to say and do what you want without being influenced purely by monetary decisions.

This makes sure that you do not allow monetary considerations from influencing your work.

If you need money, it will force you to talk, write, and behave a certain way. You will need to have a “clean” brand with a “decent public image”.

You will never express controversial opinions, or only express the ones that are allowed within the current overton window.

It will force you to betray your audience by selling them bullshit (your own or affiliate). How many influencers and creators pushed bullshit crypto projects in the last few years?

All of this will ironically mean that you will make less money in the long run (The long run is something that people who have been trained to think in terms of “monthly income” cannot comprehend).

Staying in The Game

Over 8 years of writing online, I’ve seen many people come, rise to fame, fade out, and disappear.

The typical story is of a few types:

The Lucky Marketer

1. Someone enters a niche that is taking off purely by luck. Rises to fame in that niche and makes good money.
2. Thinks that the fame will last forever because he thinks he’s popular because of himself and not because of the popularity of his niche. He increases his living expenses and inflates his lifestyle because he thinks the money will come forever.
3. The niche starts to fade away and people move on, and his income starts to decline.
4. He is used to a better lifestyle than before, so he starts to panic. He starts saying and doing crazy things just to stay relevant.
5. It doesn’t work. He pivots to a new niche.
6. It doesn’t work, because he doesn’t realize that he pivoted into an already established niche, not a new niche that is taking off (something he managed to do initially with the help of luck).
7. He quits.

There are tons of examples of guys like this. A few years ago, being a “family man” was a very popular niche. Tons of guys talked about it, almost none of them are around now.

Now, I’m not saying that these guys are frauds and scammers.

What I am saying is that these guys are prominent because of the popularity of their niche, and not because of their own content, so they have no staying power.

Niches eventually fade away. And the lucky marketer fades away with the niche, because once the money stops being high, so do his motivation levels.

The Artist Who Failed to Monetize

1. Writer/creator/artist shows up, and does a lot of good work in his early years.
2. Is unable to figure out how to properly monetize it.
3. Quits because as life gets busier, the things that don’t make money get cut first.

An example of this is Black Label Logic.

Another version:

The Artist With Personal Problems

1. Writer/creator/artist shows up, and does a lot of good work in his early years.
2. Makes money from his work.
3. His personal life is too messed up. He has a personality meltdown and “becomes a different man” overnight. Quits because he is “no longer the same person”.

Examples of these are Roosh V and Victor Pride from Bold and Determined.

The Fourth Lesson From The Content Business

Have high staying power so you can last in the game for a long time. There are 5 things you need to do to ensure you have high staying power.

1. Multiple niches.

Don’t talk about just one thing. Talk about all the allied subjects as well. For example, this is a men’s self-improvement website.

The primary topics are mindset, fitness, and money (“Get Rich. Get Fit. Get Smarter.”).

However, I do talk about things like dating, culture, and social skills because they are allied topics my audience is interested in.

2. Multiple platforms.

After you get success on one social media platform, don’t act like a muppet who just does nothing else because “this is working, so I have no motivation to change it”.

This is the mistake that Alexander Cortes made for a long time. He focused only on Twitter (now X) and his business was 100% dependent on the newsletter subscribers he got from X.

Then one fine day, he got banned by Twitter and almost lost everything. He eventually got his account unbanned (luck) and learned his lesson. He made some effort to diversify his social media exposure after the incident.

Social media platforms are inherently finicky.

You could be the algorithm’s chosen child today, and the neglected child tomorrow.

You could get your account banned for nonsensical reasons. People will forget about you sooner than you think.

Or the platform itself could shut down (e.g. Vine) or get banned (e.g. TikTok in many countries) or lose relevance (e.g. Gab).

If one platform is successful and doing well, instead of resting on your laurels, build on a different platform for diversification.

For example, I have X. But I also have Instagram, YouTube (which I am building this year), Amazon, etc.

This way, if/when things go wrong, you are not left high and dry.

3. Have a stable personal life

Don’t be single in your 40s.

Don’t do drugs or anything that can potentially fry your brain.

If you have problems, try to fix the root cause instead of looking for psychological pain balms like religions and other mass movements.

4. Monetize your work

Even if you have money, it is natural for you to focus your time on things that make money when time is scarce.

The pro bono stuff is first to go when push comes to shove.

In my case I own multiple businesses ranging from affiliate marketing, SaaS, tax/law consulting, etc. and the income from writing is a small fraction of my total income.

If the blog makes $30k in a month, then the other businesses will make $200k a month. So clearly I don’t need to write.

However, I’m not going to bullshit you and tell you that I don’t want to make money.

If I made 0 money from the blog, there would be far fewer articles here because every time I would get busy with work, this is the first thing I’d stop.

In fact, I’d probably stop writing if I made $0 from it (because it would also imply that my writing was making 0 impact on people).

MONETIZE YOUR WORK. Do not be “above” making money. Do not act like selling is “bad”.

Earn a living from your art and do it virtuously. Create products and sell them at a decently high price point.

Make them so good that you can put your heart and soul into selling them. Make them so good that the customer is DELIGHTED when he buys them.

If you can do that you will stand the test of time. You will never shut down.

5. Avoid lifestyle inflation

Always make sure that you do not use income from your creator work as living expenses.

As your creator income rises, do not inflate your lifestyle so that you need a certain level of income from your creator work, or you will physically suffer from a worse lifestyle.

Creator income tends to ebb and flow. You have good years and you have bad years.

2021-2022 were great years for everyone. 2025 was a bad year for everyone.

If you get used to spending creator money on your lifestyle, what do you do in the bad years? You are incentivized to do whatever it takes to make money.

This means promoting scam products like scam crypto sites, affiliating for junk products, excessive marketing content, or just saying crazy things on the internet to get some clicks and relevance.

All of these decisions have one thing in common: they are great in the short run, and terrible in the long run.

Focus on your audience

When you start to do well, EVERYONE and their mom will have some advice to give you.

It wouldn’t matter to them that they’ve never created anything in their life, or that they have never even made any money from the internet, or that they are not even the target readership of your work.

The feminists will say you should “respect women more”.

Weak men and spiritual faggots will say that you should stop using offensive language.

The freeloaders will say you should give away all of your products for free since you don’t need money (freeloaders always want everything for free).

They all want you to behave in a way that is agreeable to them, but when you ask them to show you the receipts for the products they’ve purchased from you, it’s always the same answer: I haven’t purchased anything from you.

The Fifth Lesson From The Content Business

Only consider feedback from people who have experience with your business or from people who purchased something from you.

A non-customer’s advice on how you should run your business means NOTHING.

If you’re actually taking feedback from someone who hasn’t taken out their card and supported you with their money, you’re wasting your time.

There will be countless people who will email you saying they’ve been reading you for 5+ years and will have “advice” for you.

Advice from someone who has never considered you helpful enough to spend money on your products (despite having read you for a while) is worth exactly as much as the revenue from that person… zero.

– Harsh Strongman