Hey, it's Niall 👋

Quick question: how much do you pay for Gmail?

Nothing, right. Same with Facebook. TikTok. Google Search. The biggest platforms on the internet are all free. And yet the companies behind them are worth trillions.

That math only works one way.

When you can't see the business model, you're the business model.

Your attention, your behaviour, your data – packaged and sold to advertisers. You're not the customer. You're the product. 👀

You've probably heard that before. But it got real for a lot of people when a security firm claimed Gmail had quietly opted users into AI training on private emails.

Google disputed it. But it went viral anyway. Because nobody thought "they would never do that."

That's the tell.

There's a version of free that works differently. Proton Mail is free, end-to-end encrypted, and makes money from paid upgrades – not your data.

Check it out below for free 👇

Then keep scrolling for more fresh ideas.

Niall Doherty
eBiz Insider

TOGETHER WITH PROTON

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SNAIL MAIL

From $14/hr Crossing Guard to $14K/Month

Christine Tyler Hill took a part-time crossing guard job in Vermont in late 2023.

Pay: $14/hr, 50 minutes each weekday morning 😕

She's also an artist and illustrator. And every morning at the crosswalk, she noticed things – migrating geese, pretty clouds, funny trash, a doe-eyed pitbull in a knitted sweater.

She started posting monthly "cloud reports" on Instagram – handwritten, illustrated snapshots of her daily observations from the intersection.

Followers loved them. If she forgot to post one, people would reach out asking where it was.

So in January she launched The Cloud Report – an 8-page handwritten zine printed on cream cardstock, mailed to subscribers every month 👇

• $8/month per subscriber

• Hand-bound, stamped, and labeled in her studio

• Content: drawings, paintings, and stories about "good trash and cute dogs"

Per The Wall Street Journal, she now has ~2,000 paying subscribers 🤯

That's roughly $14,000/month – from her observations at a crosswalk.

She's not the first person to turn a low-paying job into a personal brand. Dylan Lemay was scooping ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery when he started filming trick tosses on TikTok.

He now has 10M+ followers and used that audience to open his own ice cream shop in NYC 🔥

Different paths, same playbook: document what you already do – even if it's a "boring" job – build an audience, then monetize.

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LOCAL NEWSLETTER

$300K/Year From a Local Newsletter (City of 40,000)

We featured Ryan Sneddon and his Naptown Scoop newsletter last year when he was earning ~$200K/year.

Quick refresher: Ryan writes a free local newsletter for Annapolis, Maryland. No politics, no crime – just events, restaurant openings, things to do. He has no journalism background.

📈 Updated numbers from a recent thread on X…

• 23,000 subscribers (in a city of 40,000 – that's 57% penetration 🤯)

• ~$300,000 in revenue last year

• Open rates of 50–70% (industry average is under 20%)

The economics 👇

• Costs $0.50–$1.00 to acquire a subscriber

• Each subscriber generates $10–$12 per year in ad revenue

• That's a 10–20x return on acquisition

Revenue comes entirely from local business ads – restaurants, events, shops. If you run a business in Annapolis, the Scoop is probably the best way to reach locals 🔥

From $200K to $300K in roughly a year. And this is in a small city.

Could you start a local newsletter for your area? Ryan's advice from our original feature still holds – just commit, don't miss editions, and don't quit after three issues 😎

Related: $2400/Month From an AI Local Newsletter (30 Mins a Day)

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INVESTING

$20K to $70M in 17 Years (Powered by TikTok)

📝 From a recent episode of My First Million…

That's Chris Camillo, author of Laughing at Wall Street, describing his investing strategy.

He calls it "social ARB investing": spot changes in consumer behavior on social media before they show up in financial markets, then buy or short the affected stocks.

No fundamental analysis. No charts. Just paying attention to what people talk about online.

He started with $20K in 2007. The portfolio has grown to roughly $70M+ in returns – 75% annualized over 17 years 🤯

Some of his examples from the episode 👇

• Noticed 7-Eleven giving less shelf space to Snapple as a teenager – shorted the stock, tripled his money when Snapple reported bad earnings

• Spotted women on social media shifting from wired push-up bras to bralettes – shorted Victoria Secret before the trend hit earnings

• Tracked Google searches for "roof repair" after hail storms to front-run Wall Street on Beacon Roofing stock

On one particularly good year…

The hardest part is filtering signal from noise…

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TOGETHER WITH CHEERS

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Time Magazine says good credit is worth up to $200,000 over your lifetime. That's a lot riding on your score.

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MEME BREAK

Lord of the Blings