The search, in the open
You have real capital and you'd rather buy revenue history than test a hypothesis. This channel is that search running out loud.
Unlike Escape, nearly everything here is safe to post. A buy box says nothing about your employer. A listing you passed on says nothing about you. That's why this can be the loud room.
Before anything else, three numbers
Runway in months, capital you could lose entirely without wrecking your life, and the reserve you hold back for after close. Three separate figures, not one. The reserve is the one people skip and it's the one that stops a bad first quarter becoming a fire sale.
The arithmetic is unforgiving in one direction: replacing a salary means buying several years of it up front. Worth knowing tonight rather than four months into looking.
Free tool: The Business Appraiser
What an online business is actually worth and how the number is reached. Brokers do this on a discovery call and charge ten to fifteen percent for it later.
What's worth posting, in order of usefulness
A pass, with the actual reason. The most valuable post in this channel and the one people skip. "Content site, $96k ask, 3x, passed because the annual average hid a falling second half." Thirty seconds to write, saves someone else a week.
Your buy box once it's written. Others will tell you where it's too loose.
Something diligence turned up that the listing didn't say.
What things are actually selling for in your niche, versus what the asks say.
What to keep to yourself: live deals by name, your maximum price, anything under NDA. Sellers talk, and a buyer who posts details of a live negotiation stops being shown deals.
The number that tells you it's working
Expect to pass on almost everything. Sixty seen and fifty-eight passed is the process working. If your pass rate is under ninety percent, your box is too loose rather than the market being generous.
I'll post my own passes here weekly, including the ones I got wrong.
The full system is the Acquisition Operator Pack, which has 16 skills for buying and selling online businesses.

Premium post
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
My current investing setup and current thinking.
What I hold
Core: A rotating βTop Ten Basketβ of momentum stocks
Satellite: A few individual names where the thesis is strong
Cash: Dry powder ready for Green signals
The current thesis
TMad finds the top trending momentum stocks that I buy and hold for 10 days, while my custom Claude skill double-checks the daily indices and delivers a simple Green/Amber/Red verdict before I enter a new Top Ten Basket.
What Iβm eyeing next
Tweaking my Claude skill by combining it with Richards investing one so it pulls cleaner context from TMad, layers in my risk rules, and makes the verdict even faster.
Richardβs skills packs shine because theyβre built to be customised to exactly how you work.
Anyone else running momentum baskets or using AI to stay disciplined on entries?
What the money does when you stop needing it
Premium post
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
What the money does when you stop needing it
Three stages: get redundant from your job, then from the doing, then from earning itself. This is the third.
Income you work for stops when you stop, however many workers you run, because the judgment hours are still yours. So the last move is converting the surplus into things that don't need you to show up.
No playbook, and I'll say why
I've run the first two stages and I can show the work. I haven't run this one far enough to sell you a $299 flagship for it, and writing one anyway would break the rule the rest of the catalog depends on: products only come from models I've actually run.
So there's a pack of tools, Investing Operator at $79, and an honest gap where a flagship would be. This channel exists anyway, because the stage is real even when the product isn't.
The one rule
Money you put in here is money you can lose entirely. Not your emergency fund, not your pension, not next year's school fees. If losing it changes how you live, it doesn't go in.
That rule does more work than any allocation model, and it's the one people break first.
The three lanes, honestly
Domains. The one I've actually done for years, and the one I'm most careful about describing. Be clear what it is: inventory with an annual renewal bill, not a passive holding. Profits come on the flip, the bill arrives whether anything sells or not, and the whole model lives or dies on sell-through rate. Halve your STR assumption and a $60k year becomes a $17k year on identical capital. Anyone showing you the good version of that spreadsheet has left out the sensitivity.
Anything else you bring, watches, cards, art, a stake in a friend's thing, is welcome. Same rule, same discipline.
Stocks. The benchmark everything else has to beat. Liquid, regulated, diversified for the price of one cheap index fund, and the right home for every pound you have no specific edge on. I don't teach stock picking and I'm not going to start. If you hold individual positions, write the thesis down and say what would prove it wrong.
Crypto. Liquid, zero operation, no moat, no mercy. The only lane here that can halve overnight with nothing about it changing. It earns a place because you can hold it with zero hours, and it earns a lower cap because it punishes tourists harder than anything else. No position without a thesis you could defend to a sceptic. If you can't write it, you don't have a position, you have a mood.
What I'll keep repeating
This is not passive income. Held things mostly don't pay you until you sell. That's wealth instead of salary, which is worth having, and it is not the same as money arriving while you sleep. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something, and it probably isn't working for them either.
What's worth posting
What you did with the proceeds of something you sold, and what you'd do differently. A thesis you can defend, with the thing that would break it. The allocation rule you set on a calm day and whether you kept it on a bad one. A domain you passed on and the maths behind the pass.
What isn't
Picks. Nobody here needs your ticker and you don't need theirs. If the post could be a screenshot from a trading Discord, it belongs in a trading Discord.
Nothing here is financial advice. I'm not qualified to give any, and neither is anyone else unless they say so and mean it.
Join Patey Club Community
Building businesses with AI, domains, investing, poker.


