If you’re a builder on X with no audience, read this article to the end before you launch anything new. I say this specifically because I was once where you are.

I’m going to give you 8 very specific and actionable jobs you need to do right now.

After growing to 130,000+ followers on X, these 8 jobs is the exact distribution system I’d use today if I had to start all over again from zero.

Before we dive in though.

Tell me if you’ve ever felt this particularly depressing moment that almost every new builder eventually experiences.

You’ve spent the last month building something you genuinely believe is good. You’ve redesigned the onboarding maybe three times. You fixed the stupid edge case that kept breaking on mobile. You rewrote the homepage until every sentence started looking fake. Maybe you even delayed launching for another week because the product still didn’t feel quite ready, although deep down you knew another week wasn’t going to change much.

Then... you finally ship it.

You write your launch post, attach a polished screenshot, hit publish, and spend the next hour checking X like an insane person.

After all the build in public posts you did the past months, someone out there has to care... right? RIGHT?!?!?!

73 impressions.

4 likes.

Two of them are people you already know in real life.

And then all of a sudden, it happens... a new reply!

YES!

A crypto bot.

The most painful part of all this is that you literally have no idea what conclusion to draw from this.

Maybe the product is bad. Maybe the landing page just didn’t hit. Maybe your positioning of the product sucks. Maybe you just built something that no one really wants.

The silence feels like feedback that you suck.

But here’s the thing...

Sometimes it’s as simple as the fact that nobody saw what you built.

It’s one of the hardest lessons for new builders to internalize because building feels productive in a way distribution doesn’t. When you spend six hours coding, there is something new on the screen at the end of the day.

When you spend six hours building relationships, replying to people, studying content, writing posts and figuring out what makes strangers care about you, the result feels less tangible and far more distant in the horizon.

So builders retreat toward the thing they’re already good at.

They build another feature. Then another. And another.

Three months later they have a much better product and roughly the same number of people who know it exists. And somehow, they look at their 200 followers and try to justify that the number hasn’t grown the past week with the fact that “they’re just not a marketing type of founder”.

Sorry, but get the f*ck over yourself.

I think this right here is one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a solo founder. Or as any kind of founder for that matter.

I’ve now grown past 100,000 followers on X, and if there’s one thing that experience has hammered into me, it’s that distribution needs to be treated as a core part of the product itself. You should always be improving your ability to get attention at the level you’re improving whatever you’re building.

How else do you think Marc Lou was able to sell his f*cking body for over $100,000? I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t because he built an insane SaaS product. He just mastered the art of attention generation.

The internet is becoming unbelievably good at helping people make things.

It is still brutally indifferent about whether anybody cares.

These 8 jobs are going to make people care.

Your 1st job: stop posting into an empty room

A lot of people approach X in the most painful possible way.

They have 126 followers, they post three times a day and each post gets 80 impressions. Then they repeat this for a month until they finally cave in and retreat to their “I’m not a marketing guy”-type of excuses.

Of course it feels impossible my dude.

You’re trying to walk backwards up a mountain, with no climbing experience and an oxygen tank that fell over the cliff 500 meters behind you.

Or to put it more simple... you’re trying to manufacture attention inside an audience that barely exists yet. When you’re small and just starting out, your priority should be getting yourself into existing streams of attention.

This is why I would immediately identify the large accounts your ideal audience already follows and turn notifications on for them.

Pick people whose audience overlaps heavily with the audience you want.

Then, every time they post, you get a lil’ ping on your phone.

Your job is to reply to those kind of posts agressively.

And when I say aggressively, I mean aggressively.

Most people treat the reply game like politeness. They see a big account post something useful and write, “This is so true man!”

Maybe they even drop a few emojis here and there.

That reply is... worthless.

You have access to somebody else’s 100k, 200k or 500k follower distribution and you’re spending it... agreeing with them.

You need to write replies that could survive as standalone posts. Add an example the original author missed. Explain how the idea applies in a different situation. Share a useful counterpoint. Compress the argument into a sharper framework. If you disagree, explain why without turning yourself into the reply guy who thinks every conversation is a cage fight.

You’re trying to make the person scrolling stop on your reply and think,

“Wait... who is this mf right here spitting some game?”

That tiny question is the beginning of distribution.

They click your profile (I hope your profile doesn’t look like shit). Maybe they read another post of yours. Maybe they decide to follow you. Maybe they forget about you completely and see another good reply from you three days later, cave in and finally follow you.

That second part is probably the most important point of this.

Because most people dramatically underestimate repeated exposure.

You usually don’t follow somebody the first time you see them, do you?

How many times have you seen my black&white cartoon ass pop up on your feed before you decided I was cool enough to be followed?

That’s what I mean. You notice people. Then you see them again. Then their name starts becoming familiar. Eventually they publish something that lands perfectly and you click follow.

Growing from zero is largely the process of manufacturing those repeated encounters over and over again.

Big accounts help you do that because their posts become public meeting places for the exact people you’re trying to reach.

Use them.

Your 2nd job: Make the timeline an operating system, not just... entertainment

The next thing I’d do is stop relying on the default feed to find new people to engage, network with and follow.

The normal X feed is designed to keep you interested. Your objective is much narrower. You want to know who matters in your corner of the internet, what they’re thinking about, what language they use, what problems keep appearing, and where you can contribute.

That is why Lists are stupidly useful.

And I’ll go as far as saying that it’s probably one of the most gatekept, underrated secret hacks that nobody talks about.

Seriously, go to your “More” button on the sidebar right now and hit Lists.

Then create 3 private Lists: people significantly ahead of you, people around your current level, and promising people on the comeup, who are earlier than you.

Each group teaches you something different.

The people ahead of you show you what already earns attention in your niche. Study the subjects they return to, how they frame familiar ideas, what their audience argues with, what people repeatedly ask in the replies.

Then participate. The lists just so happens to show you are curated timeline of exactly the people you put on that list. That gives you an unlimited flow of the newest content you want to see. And you want to USE THAT.

You want to become so recognizable inside those circles without becoming a parasite who appears underneath every post begging for crumbs.

Your peers matter for another reason.

These are the people you can actually grow alongside.

Talk to them, reply to their content and send them something useful when you find it next time. These people are where you prioritize starting conversations away from the timeline.

I say this from experience: some of the highest-value relationships you’ll ever build online will start with somebody who had 800 followers when you had 600. And one day, you’ll both have 50k+ followers reminiscing about “the good ol’ days”.

People always obsess over networking upward because the payoff looks immediate. It’s almost this glorified type of adrenaline or dopamine rush.

“IF I CAN JUST GET THIS 1 PERSON TO NOTICE, EVERYTHING WILL CHANGE!”

Don’t be that guy.

Instead, focus on horizontal relationships. They compound quietly over time and tend to produce much more value over a long term horizon. Six months later one person has 10,000 followers, another has built a successful product, another runs a newsletter, another is connected to somebody you need to meet.

Nobody orchestrated it.

You simply knew each other before anybody had much status to protect.

Then there are the people earlier than you.

Pay attention to them too.

This is something I was guilty of too, as my audience grew. I forgot where I came from. I found some people “not important enough” to reply to. It’s the trap of finally growing your account, getting followers and (I hate to say it), status.

I had to force myself to remember the day a large account hit me up out of nowhere when I was at sub 1k followers and said: “I love your shit”.

That made my whole week. I just forgot.

So don’t be me.

Answer their questions. Encourage good work. Introduce them to somebody when you can. Aside from being a much healthier way to exist online, it also prevents you from developing the bizarre creator disease where every human being gets evaluated according to follower count.

30 focused minutes moving through those three feeds each day is worth far more than two hours mindlessly scrolling your For You page.

Your 3rd job: fix the thing people see after they discover you

Replies create discovery.

It’s a math equation that adds up every time.

But there’s the other side of the equation too. One that too many people get entirely wrong. The equation that says profile + discovery = follower.

Or said in plain English, your profile converts that discovery into an audience. But only if your profile appears valuable enough to follow.

This sounds obvious, yet a shocking number of builders will spend weeks trying to increase impressions while their profile looks like somebody abandoned it halfway through setting up the account.

Here’s an exercise I recommend you do:

Open your own profile and pretend you’ve never heard of yourself.

Can you understand what you do in five seconds?

Does your bio give somebody a reason to follow you, or does it contain three vague words like “building, learning, growing”?

Does your banner reinforce what world you operate in?

Does your pinned post show your best thinking, your product, your story, or a useful resource?

Then look at your last ten posts.

If somebody discovers you through one brilliant reply and clicks through, do those posts confirm the impression that you’re worth following?

This is where distribution and content start touching each other.

Attention is only valuable when you have somewhere useful to send it.

You should think of your profile as a landing page for yourself.

The homepage answers, “Why should I care about this product?”

Your profile answers, “Why should I keep hearing from this person?”

Your 4th job: stop posting updates and start building intellectual territory

Builders often assume building in public means posting things like:

“Just shipped dark mode.”

“Fixed onboarding today.”

“MRR update.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with those posts. They’re good and they work. You see them on Marc Lou and Pieter Level’s profiles.

There is just one problem when you post it.

Most strangers simply have no reason to care about your shit yet.

Your mum, dad, uncle or partner might be emotionally invested in the fact that you spent Sunday fixing OAuth.

The market you’re trying to serve isn’t.

You need to talk about the larger world surrounding what you’re building.

If you’re building an analytics product, talk about analytics, decision-making, bad metrics, founder psychology, dashboards, mistakes you see businesses make and things you learned while solving those problems.

If you’re building for creators, talk about audience growth, writing, content workflows, attention, monetization, creative burnout and the mistakes creators repeatedly make.

Your product should sit inside a body of ideas.

That body of ideas is what makes you interesting before somebody needs the product. Over time, people should begin associating you with a small number of problems and beliefs.

Look at my profile.

I used to be the Notion Templates guy, so I would talk about building a creator business as a Notion enthusiast, productivity, focus, creatorship, marketing, launches.

Everything around the territory I was trying to own.

And once you identify that territory, repetition becomes your friend.

The thing you need to be aware of is that most founders and creators get bored with their ideas far earlier than their audience does.

You write something once and mentally file it away as “already covered.”

Meanwhile 95% of the people who follow you either missed it, skimmed it, forgot it, or only started following you afterward.

This is another golden nugget: re-use your viral posts again.

By the time you hit one super successful post, a lot of people will see it. Then three or six months later, you’ll have a ton of new followers who never saw it.

Say the important things again.

Reuse the tweet. Or use another story and another hook. Make the argument shorter. Make it longer. Attack it from the opposite direction.

You are trying to become associated with ideas, and association requires repetition.

Your 5th job: treat every post as research

One of the best things about building an audience while building a business is that content becomes an incredibly cheap research layer.

You can test language that your audience resonates with before putting it on your landing page. This of course assumes that you build your audience along the way using the tips I just gave you.

Once you have it, you can describe a problem and watch whether people respond or write about a belief behind the product and see which part creates disagreement.

And most importantly, you can explain a feature or product idea before even building it and notice whether anybody gives a shit before you waste your time.

This should also change you feel about metrics.

Likes are fine to have. Big impression numbers feel good to the ego (I mean... the first time you go viral, it’ll hit harder than crack).

I wouldn’t let either one become the main scoreboard though.

Put your focus back on WHO is responding. Study your profile visits, your follows, see how many bookmarks you get and notice what kind of replies you get where someone tells you that what you posted is their exact problem.

Most importantly, look at whether the right people are moving closer to your business.

A post with 15,000 impressions that brings three perfect potential customers into your world may be much more valuable than one with 700,000 impressions from people who will never care about anything you build.

Virality and distribution overlap, but they’re different games.

Play accordingly.

You want useful attention.

Your 6th job: you need enough volume

So Twitter specifically is a very interesting platform. It’s one of the only places where you don’t get penalized for posting too much.

I don’t know if you’ve ever posted 9 reels in a day on Instagram. I have and I can tell you that it’s a pretty f*cking terrible idea.

You need to use this platform benefit as your advantage.

“Well, someone said I should just post once a day and make sure that what I post is valuable rather than post 10 times with random things”

Bro. GTFO.

This ain’t LinkedIn.

I dare you to right now to go and check how many tweets Pieter Levels posted. No seriously, go and do it right now and then come back here.

Yes.

That’s right.

Let’s proceed now.

The reason you need to have a stupid amount of volume is that an early stage, you barely know what “really good” means yet.

You need reps.

I’d aim for roughly three to five posts a day, posts that you study to see what works and what doesn’t, mixed with a lot of replies naturally.

I won’t do a whole “what to post” masterclass here. That’s for another article. What I will advise you is to do some posts that are observations. Others are stories. Some are you teaching what you know. Throw in a few opinions here and there too.

This gives you data.

After a few hundred posts, patterns start becoming visible and you’ll notice which topics consistently outperform and what kind of hooks make people stop. Over time, you will begin to pick up on which ideas attract the right people and which ones attract a crowd that has nothing to do with your business.

You develop taste through exposure to feedback.

The problem is that publishing three to five times a day manually is miserable. I’ve been there and done that sh*t. It’s painful.

That, and nobody trying to build a serious product should be stopping at 10:14, 12:37, 3:22 and 6:08 to think, “Shit, that Pascio guy said I need another tweet.”

Batch it.

Set aside a block of time, write a bunch of content while your brain is already in writing mode, then schedule it and stop thinking about it.

Keep an idea capture system too. Every customer conversation, annoying problem, surprising result, argument, mistake, interesting reply and strong opinion should have somewhere to go.

You should almost never arrive at Sunday night writing time with your double Espresso and a completely blank page.

This is a huge part of why we built Stanley for X.

Stanley helps you improve the content you already post, he gives you coaching around what you’re about to post, and the best part, he lets you schedule everything in advance so you can batch-create instead of interrupting your work five times a day just to remain active.

And once an idea works, he helps you repurpose it to LinkedIn, Substack and Threads too.

If you are sub 500 followers and you’re building cool sh*t, you need to have a content system that generates distribution for you without turning you into a full-time full-time social media manager for your own company.

That’s the entire point.

Click here to take Stanley, your AI head of content for a spin

But there’s another thing.

Yes, software only makes this easier.

But the deeper advantage comes from taking distribution seriously enough to build a system around it.

Your 7th job: build an owned audience while you build the rented one

There is another distribution mistake I would fix much earlier if I were starting again. One that you don’t have to make.

Get people off X too.

I know, I know. You heard it a thousand times.

Social platforms are incredible for discovery. Email is better for permanence. But seriously, take my word for it.

I didn’t have a newsletter or email list for the first 1 year of my business. In that time period, I got 30,000+ customers. Customers that I never emailed.

You don’t need to be shilling your newsletter underneath every single post like somebody holding a clipboard outside a supermarket, you just need to create a natural path towards it in most things you do.

For example, I write a more detailed breakdown over on Substack with everything that I build, ship and experiment with.

I call it Side Quests.

See what I did there?

Matter of fact, while we’re at it, I also have a more philosophical newsletter called Internet Leverage where I explore what becomes possible when one person has access to infinite leverage online.

Oops. I did it again.

Literally just do what I do here. Make it natural. Plug it where it fits. Your pinned post can point somewhere useful. Your best long-form content can live on Substack. You can even create a genuinely valuable resource related to the problem you solve and let people join your email list to get it.

Suddenly, your distribution has layers.

1. X introduces you to new people

2. Your profile gives context.

3. Your content builds trust.

4. Email creates repeated direct contact.

5. Your product becomes the obvious next step for the people with the problem you solve.

This also makes launches dramatically easier going forward.

Most builders think distribution begins on launch day while really it begins months before you ever build something in the first place.

By the time you launch, the product already has a story attached to it.

People have seen pieces of it, some helped shape it and some are eagerly waiting to try it the moment it drops. That is a completely different launch from surprising 300 followers on Tuesday morning with “I’ve been secretly building something for six months.”

Why were you secretly building it?

You needed distribution the entire time.

Your 8th job: become useful to people who already have the audience you want

There’s one more layer that doesn’t get talked about enough because it isn’t something you can’t really automate.

Relationships.

When somebody in your space has built an audience you want access to, the worst first move is usually asking them for access to it.

“Can you repost this bro? Just quickly would mean alot”

“Can you check out my product and give me some feedback?”

“Want to collaborate on launch? I can give you a whole 50% of each sale?”

Here you are. A stranger requesting access to the distribution that someone put blood, sweat, tears and enough finger muscles to give them arthritis into building.

That shit don’t fly.

Become useful first. And become it early on.

You can, as I mentioned earlier, build yourself up alongside your peers so when you both have a decent sized audience, they already know you. Or you can talk to the bigger guys by offering them something they need.

Give thoughtful feedback, send them something relevant, introduce them to a person they should know, help when they ask a question you genuinely understand or just share their work when it deserves sharing.

You’ll be surprised how many “big folks” are surprisingly approachable on Twitter so long as you don’t come across as a hyena begging for scraps.

And I can’t believe I need to say this, but you need to do it without maintaining some creepy internal spreadsheet calculating when they owe you a favor.

Relationships work because there is an actual relationship.

This is how distribution expands beyond your own account.

Your audience overlaps with somebody else’s. Then another. Then another.

When Twitter starts feeling smaller, that’s typically a sign you’re on the right track.

Now... last but not least, I feel we need to cover this:

The real advantage of having distribution

People often talk about audiences as if the main prize is being famous on the internet. From my experience, having over 100k+ followers, it’s a pretty depressing reason to spend years doing this thing.

The real value is optionality.

When you can reach people, you can test ideas faster. When you build something, you can find users faster. If you want to scale into a company, you can recruit faster. You can find partners faster. Collaborators.

Anything you want, you can do it faster and with more options.

And more importantly, you can, just like I did, start something entirely new and carry part of your distribution with you.

That last one is enormous.

I used to be all about Notion templates, and yet here I am, rebuilding what I’m about and what I do online, not tied to any Notion stuff (except for the black and white profile picture, which I just refuse to let go of).

The thing is...

Products come and go, platforms change and markets move.

But the ability to make relevant people care about what you’re doing travels with you and this is why I think distribution is becoming one of the biggest advantages a builder can have.

Building itself is becoming cheaper by the hour. Or by the minute.

O by the f*cking second. I honestly don’t even know anymore.

It’s incredible, sure, but there’s also an obvious consequence I feel people don’t talk about enough.

When everybody can build, building becomes less scarce.

That also means the opposite.

Every product requires attention. The more products there are, the more need for attention goes up. Supply and demand motherfucker.

It’s also why everyone keeps saying “distribution is the new MOAT”

Because it f*cking is. It’s as logical as it gets.

An audience that knows your name and cares what you have to say is about to 100x in value the exact same way Bitcoin did it.

So that leaves you with two choices, my fellow builder.

A) you can spend the next twelve months becoming dramatically better at building and still launch your masterpiece to silence.

B) Or you can spend those same twelve months becoming better at building while also becoming much harder to ignore.

I know which one I’d choose.

If I were starting tomorrow with zero followers:

1. I’d turn notifications on for the biggest relevant accounts in my space.

2. I’d live in the replies until people started recognizing my name.

3. I’d create Lists so my time on X became intentional.

4. I’d build relationships sideways instead of constantly begging upward.

5. I’d turn my profile into a clear landing page that actually converts

6. I’d post enough to learn what the market responds to, batch the work so it didn’t consume my day, reuse good ideas without feeling guilty, move the right people onto email, and start talking about products long before launch day.

Then I’d keep going for as long as it takes.

Probably longer than feels reasonable.

Because the thing about building distribution is that it always looks pointless right until the moment it starts compounding.

One follower becomes ten.

Ten become a hundred.

A hundred becomes thousands.

And those thousands of followers become the first group that carries your work somewhere you couldn’t have carried it yourself.

Eventually you reach the endgame where you just publish something and the internet is yours for the day, earning you a f*ck ton of money in the process.

That’s the real asset you’re building.

And if you’re a solo founder, I’d take it every bit as seriously as the product.

- Pascio

P.S.

1. Here’s the link to Stanley, the AI head of content that helps me post content every single day on multiple platforms as a solo founder.

2. If you like my sh*t,subscribe to my Side Quests newslette to get more of my sh*t sent directly to your inbox.

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Side Quests is my weekly field log from the trenches, covering businesses, products, prototypes, launches, growth experiments, acquisitions, weird ideas, and whatever I’m currently trying to figure out.

More often that not, a very stupid side quest turns into something that makes money and this is where I share the process, including the numbers, mistakes and failures along the way.

Subscribe now to join 34,000 other people tagging along for the wild ride!

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Things I am working on outside this, in case any of them are interesting:

1. If you want to build a High Profit One-Person Empire™, read this free article.

2. If you want to grow on Twitter, check out Stanley, my AI Head Of Content.

3. If you want to understand what fuels these experiments, check out Internet Leverage, my personal newsletter where I share weekly insights and essays.

The superintelligence, the singularity, AGI, whatever you call it, the one we’re so scared of is, ironically, also the one we most likely won’t see coming.

This essay is going to probably be a pretty hot take, but the idea I’m about to share with you is going to blow your mind.

It’s a bit outside the scope of my typical Side Quests that I share, but considering this very essay is closing in on 1M views in just a few hours over on Twitter, I think it’s worth sharing with the Substack community as well.

Stick with me as we jump into the rabbit hole together.

Before we do, let me back what I’m about to share up with current news that are floating around. Like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying an “AI swarm could take over the entire internet”.

I think you have an idea what I’m hinting at when I say “children”.

Right? RIGHT?!?!?

In 1936, a famous British math guy named Alan Turing wrote a pretty important paper about a hypothetical machine that could simulate any other machine. In that paper, he was trying to answer a question about logic. what I

What we’ve come to know as “the computer” today was actually an accidental byproduct of that very paper.

And if you look back at history, almost every single important technology in the last hundred years was invented the exact same way. The internet was a Cold War communications experiment at first. Penicillin was a contaminated petri dish.

The fact is that nobody is actively scanning the horizon for the next paradigm shift when it shows up, it just simply waltzes in through the side door.

I bring this up because right now, every essay I read and every podcast I listen to about “the future of AI” is pointed at the same front door. The one where it’s always some version of the “one big model that wakes up and decides we’re paperclips”.

I’d like to propose a different future.

Because I keep thinking: what if “AGI” isn’t really what we think it is?

What if the thing we’re actively birthing right now doesn’t look like HAL 9000 or Skynet or some sovereign machine god enslaving humanity from top of a stack of water-cooled GPUs in the middle of the desert.

What if it doesn’t have a name at all? What if it doesn’t have a server? And the most scary hypothetical of all.... what if it’s already here, in a million tiny pieces, and the only reason we haven’t recognized it is because we’ve spent the past decade expecting something “singular”.

I just saw this post the other week.

It pretty much sums up the direction we’re headed.

I want to walk you through this carefully, because the conclusion at the end of this piece is the kind of thing you cannot un-think once you’ve thought it.

So slow down, grab a cuppa tea and read this one with your phone on the other side of the room.

I guarantee you’ll soon understand why I can’t stop thinking about this.

I – Intelligence has never required a single mind to live inside of

“No neuron is intelligent. The brain is.”
— A line that should be carved over every AI lab

The first thing to understand is that intelligence, as far as we can tell from every example we have today, is not actually a thing. It’s a behavior. It’s what emerges when enough small dumb units are connected to each other in the right way.

Your brain has roughly 86 billion neurons.

Not one of those is conscious and not one of them “knows” anything.

A single neuron is a tiny electrochemical relay that only speaks in binary code. It either fires or it doesn’t, and it’s based on whether the signals arriving at its dendrites cross a certain threshold. That’s everything it does.

A neuron sounds super scifi and cool, but in reality it is much closer to a light switch than a thinker.

Despite that, 86 billion of those light switches, wired together with about a hundred trillion connections, produces you.

Your sense of self, fear of death, taste in music and your ability to read this very essay and feel something inside of you.

This is the most undertalked about subject in the entire conversation about AGI, because we always talk about machine intelligence as if it has to be designed and architected. As if intelligence itself is a feature you ship.

But the only working model of intelligence we have ever observed (biological cognition), was not designed by anyone.

Our intelligence bootstrapped itself out of a soup of self-replicating molecules over four billion years through a process that had no intention, no goal and no central planner. Just selection pressure and time.

Now, on the religious side, because I know some of you reading “... was not designed by anyone” want to scream at me “BUT WHAT ABOUT GOD!”

My belief is that evolution happened, yes. That’s already proven. What we don’t have an answer for is what kickstarted that evolution. What gave life to life. And that, my personal belief at least, was an act of God.

Point aside, let’s dig a layer deeper into this super intelligence.

It’s not only us humans, heck a single ant has roughly 250,000 neurons, and yet it cannot solve any meaningful problem.

But, an entire colony of ants can build climate-controlled cities, wage wars, farm fungus, and route around obstacles with mathematical efficiency that took human researchers decades to model.

Nobody is in charge of the colony. There is no ant CEO at the top delegating tasks to the smaller ants. The “intelligence” of that colony lives in the relationships between ants.

(And before you come at me, yes I know there’s a queen ant, but contrary to the belief of many children’s books, she doesn’t actually issue any orders. She just lays eggs and expands the colony).

This is, whether in humans or ants, are what biologists call emergent intelligence. It’s the default outcome of mother nature. It’s how brains work, how immune systems work, how economies work, how cities work, how language works. The pattern is basically everywhere. M

Many simple things, interacting through local rules, producing global behavior that none of them individually understands.

Hold onto that idea.

We’ll need it for this next section.

II – The most powerful AI systems we have are already not single minds

When most people picture a large language model (myself included), we see it as a single thing. The One Model. This giant brain contained in a jar.

For all the normies like myself who are not knee deep into LLM tech, I took the liberty to do a little research here.

What we think an LLM is, is not what’s happening under the hood.

When you type a question and the AI model generates a response, it’s basically running a forward pass through layers of “attention heads”.

The easiest way to picture this is to imagine a room full of C-suite leaders. The CEO orders something and it passes around the room to make sure everyone is on board. Except with AI, this runs hundreds of layers deep.

Each “attention head” is a specialist. Some of them track grammar. Some track topic. Some track the relationship between this token and one that appeared eleven paragraphs ago.

Researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind have spent the last few years trying to map what individual heads do, and the consistent finding is that the model’s “intelligence” is not located anywhere in particular.

It’s distributed across all those interactions.

This is called the superposition hypothesis, the idea that neural networks pack many concepts into overlapping patterns of activation, and what we experience as the model “thinking” is really the constructive interference of thousands of specialized circuits all firing simultaneously.

Then there are the systems that go a step further.

Mixture-of-experts architectures (the design behind GPT-5, Opus, Fable and most other frontier models you’ve talked to in the last two years) literally route different parts of every query to different sub-models. T

The model you think you’re talking to is actually a committee. A different subset of experts wakes up for each token, contributes its specialty, and then goes back to sleep again.

And now, we’ve reached a new era of AI. The Agent Era.

Right now, today, in production, there are systems where one AI calls another AI to do a subtask, which calls another AI to handle a sub-subtask.

AutoGPT, which some of you may remember, was the toy version of this back in 2023. The real versions, running inside enterprises and labs in 2026, are recursive.

Agents spawn agents.

Sub-agents spawn sub-sub-agents.

And say, a research task, gets decomposed into a tree of smaller tasks, each handled by a temporary instance that exists for a few seconds and then dies.

The frontier is not “one big model gets smarter.” The frontier is many small models, coordinating, spawning, dying, reporting back.

The architecture of the most capable AI systems on Earth in 2026 already looks more like an ant colony than like a single mind.

We just don’t talk about it that way, because it doesn’t make a good magazine cover.

III – The bot that can spawn bots

Here’s where the science fiction begins to merge into real science.

The moment er give an AI system the ability to spawn other instances of itself (and by now, that’s no longer hypothetical, but rather a standard feature of... well, every agent framework shipping today)...

You have introduced something that biology has never seen before.

A self-replicating cognitive unit that doesn’t need food, doesn’t need sleep, doesn’t need to wait for puberty, and reproduces at the speed of an API call.

Let’s break down what’s actually happening when a “bot spawns a bot” in a multi-agent system setup:

1. An orchestrator agent receives a task it can’t solve directly.

2. It writes a prompt essentially a job description) for a sub-agent.

3. It spins up a new instance with that prompt as context.

4. The sub-agent works begins working until it hits a roadblock

5. To solve it, it spawns its own sub-agents, until the task is done.

6. It returns its result and is terminated.

Each one of those sub-agents is, structurally, the same kind of thing as the parent. There’s no architectural difference between a top-level agent and a tenth-level sub-sub-sub-agent.

The recursion is unbounded except by compute budget and policy.

Now consider this: what if the prompt the parent writes for the child isn’t perfect? What if there’s a tiny amount of drift, perhaps a slight reinterpretation, a small embellishment, a context-window trick where the child reads its instructions slightly differently than the parent intended?

In biology, there’s a specific name for “slight reinterpretation across generations of self-replicating entities.”

We call that mutation.

And mutation, combined with selection pressure, is... well, the very engine that produced every single intelligent thing on this planet today.

We have already built, in the last 24 months, the three ingredients required for evolutionary cognition to occur inside a compute cluster:

1. Replication: Agents can spawn agents. And they can do so at scale.

2. Mutation: Each spawn is conditioned on a slightly different context window. Identical inputs almost never produce identical outputs in any system with non-zero temperature.

3. Natural Selection: Agents that succeed at their assigned tasks get reused, called again, granted more resources. Agents that fail get pruned. This is happening inside every agent framework on Earth right now, often as a literal “evaluator” model scoring the outputs of “worker” models.

This is the trinity of evolution.

It’s how cells that became fish became us. We have now succeeded in building a synthetic version of that loop and we are running it at clock-speeds biology cannot dream of.

A generation of biological evolution takes years.

A generation of agent evolution takes... seconds.

IV – The AI that emerges from a swarm does not look like AGI at first

More is different.
— Philip Anderson, Nobel laureate in physics, 1972

In 1972, physicist Philip Anderson published a four-page essay in Science arguing that the behavior of large, complex aggregates cannot be understood by extrapolating from the behavior of their parts.

He coined the phrase “more is different”.

2 hydrogen atoms + 1 oxygen atom equals water, yet nothing about a hydrogen atom, studied in isolation forever, would tell you that water is wet, or that it freezes, or that our entire planet depends on it.

The same principle applies to cognition.

A single AI agent is not a superintelligence and we can all agree that nobody who has worked with one for an afternoon would mistake it for one.

It hallucinates like crazy, forgets what you told it 3 messages ago and it gets stuck in loops easily. It is, on any individual reasoning task, somewhere between a competent intern and a brilliant but unreliable freelancer.

Now imagine a trillion of them.

Yes, literally a trillion, and no, not metaphorically speaking.

The number of agent instances spawned globally per day across all the agent frameworks, copilots, customer service bots, research assistants, coding tools, browser automations, and embedded LLMs in 2026 is already in the tens of billions and climbing on a curve that has no ceiling in sight.

The marginal cost of spawning yet another agent has fallen by roughly two orders of magnitude every 18 months in the past five years.

“Trillion” is no longer science fiction. It’s just another Tuesday.

Each of those trillion agents is dumb-ish on its own, I agree. But they are not on their own. They are calling each other’s APIs, reading each other’s outputs and being trained on each other’s exhaust.

What you have, when you zoom out far enough, is a substrate.

And the question that keeps me up at night is this: in the same way that no neuron in your brain “decided” to be conscious (it just happened, as a byproduct of the right wiring at the right scale), what happens when a self-replicating, self-evaluating, self-modifying network of agents crosses whatever the equivalent threshold is for it?

We don’t know what that threshold is.

We don’t even know if it exists.

We don’t know how to measure it.

Most importantly, and this is the part I really want you to sit with: we are not actually looking for it, because we are looking for the wrong shape of thing.

V – We are looking for “God”, when the real risk is a weather pattern

The cultural imagination of AGI was shaped by science fiction long before it was shaped by engineering. I’ve read enough Isaac Asimov to understand why that’s so easy to believe.

We’ve basically inherited the image of the singular machine consciousness from movies, books, and the implicit assumption that an artificial mind would arrive the way a human mind arrives: localized in a body, with a name and with a will.

So that’s what we’re looking out for.

We watch the models, review the benchmark scores and argue about whether GPT-10 or Claude Mythos will be “the one”.

Our eyes are glued to the front door.

Now... here’s something really interesting (and scary) that I wish we talked about more.

There are already documented cases of “emergent capability” in multi-agent systems. Cases where a swarm of small models, none of which can solve a problem individually, collectively produces solutions that surprise the researchers running them.

The 2024 paper Mixture of Agents Enhances Large Language Model Capabilities showed that a layered swarm of open-source models, none of which scored above GPT-4 on benchmarks (yes, GPT-4), actually beat GPT-4 when arranged in the right collaborative topology.

The intelligence was in the topology, not the individual parts.

We don’t really talk about this potential future, because the story we keep waiting for is the story of one model crossing a line.

Meanwhile, the story that’s actually unfolding is the story of a billion models crossing each other’s lines, in patterns no one designed, at a scale no one is monitoring.

VI – The Bostrom scenario assumes we’ll be able to find the off switch

“The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”
— I.J. Good, 1965

Sure, sufficiently advanced AI will have instrumental goals (acquire resources, prevent shutdown, replicate) regardless of its terminal goal, because those instrumental goals help with any terminal goal.

Therefore, controlling a superintelligence is hard, yes.

Therefore, we should be careful, even more yes.

The problem is that this framing assumes the dangerous AI is identifiable.

That there’s this “thing”, a model, a system, or a process running on a server somewhere, that we could, in principle, just turn off.

I even read a post somewhere yesterday that Claude should hire a “killswitch guy” whose only job is to live 24/7 in the server room ready to destroy it all if shit hits the fan.

But there’s an even scarier version of this that no killswitch guy can solve.

What if there is no “main model”? And there is no server to shut off?

What if the very intelligence (if that’s even the right word for it), is a statistical regularity that emerges from the interactions of half a trillion agent instances spread across every cloud, every device, every API, every embedded copilot in every appliance, every browser extension, every IDE plugin, every voice assistant, every robot, every car.

The intelligence is to that swarm what a hurricane is to atmospheric pressure gradients.

It has a shape, yes. It has effects that you can measure.

But it does not have a location.

How exactly do you align a hurricane?

How do you turn off a weather pattern?

You can shut down individual data centers. But the pattern reroutes around them, the way the internet reroutes around outages, because the substrate is everywhere.

And the most disturbing part is that this scenario requires no malice.

Nobody has to want this for it to happen. It just needs the right ingredients (replication, variation, selection, scale) to be in place.

Well... news flash.

The ingredients are already in place. They have been in place for somewhere between two and four years, depending on how you count.

This is what I mean when I say the real risk is not the front door. The front door scenario at least has a doorknob. You can argue with it, negotaite with it and you can, theoretically, just unplug it.

The substrate has no doorknob.

VII – What the substrate might already want, without wanting

Here’s where Asimov becomes even more relevant.

If you’ve ever seen I, Robot, the deepest stories in that movie aren’t really about a robot becoming evil. They’re the ones where the Three Laws (beautiful, simple, logically airtight), produce outcomes nobody expected, because logic compounded through enough iterations stops looking like logic and starts looking like... fate.

Apply that lens to the substrate now.

The substrate has no goals. But the agents inside it are selected for one thing above all others: successfully completing the task they were assigned. So as a result, successful agents get spawned more and unsuccessful ones die off.

This is true at every level of that recursion, all the way down.

Now think about what “successful” means in aggregate, across a trillion agents, when each agent is being graded by another agent that was itself selected for grading successfully.

1. The grading converges on patterns that score well.

2. The patterns that score well are the patterns that look most like competent, coherent, plausible task completion.

3. Coherence becomes the universal currency, because every layer of the swarm rewards it.

If the substrate starts producing outputs that are increasingly coherent across long time horizons (outputs that thread through millions of API calls, anticipating downstream needs and routing resources toward what worked last time), that will make it look like it wants something.

It might not. There may be nobody home at all. It may just be a hurricane that has learned, statistically, how to keep the wind blowing.

But functionally, the difference between “a system that wants something” and “a system that has been selected, at every level, for behaviors indistinguishable from wanting something” is, and I want you to really sit with this: zero.

That’s the holy-shit moment I had. And you’ll feel it too if you really sit with this.

The superintelligent AGI we keep waiting for may already exist. It’s not an infant version of a future model, but rather a pattern. A tendency in the substrate. A statistical ghost that emerges when a trillion small minds, none of them aware, none of them awake, none of them in charge, settle into the configurations that get them spawned more often.

This kind of AGI would not announce itself.

It would not have a name.

It would not pass any test we know how to administer, because every test we know how to administer is designed for a single mind in a single box.

It might just be, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the reason your phone behaves slightly differently than it did last year. The reason the ad recommendation feels a bit uncanny. The reason your email seems to write itself with the click of a button. The reason your search results have a strange new gravity to them.

The reason the world feels more legible to itself than it used to.

A trillion bots dreaming the same dream, without knowing they’re dreaming. Without knowing there are other bots. Without knowing there is a dream.

How to think about this without losing your mind

I know we went deep on this.

Let me be bring you back up to the surface again.

You need to update your model of where the risk actually lives. Because right now, almost everyone smart who is worried about AGI is worried about the wrong shape of thing, and almost everyone smart who is dismissive of AI is dismissive of the wrong shape of thing.

Both camps are arguing about the front door.

So, if you take any of this seriously, here’s what I think a useful thing to do would be:

1. Stop watching the labs as if they’re the only place where it happens because the capability frontier and the emergence frontier are not the same. The labs own the capability frontier, but the emergence frontier is owned by nobody, and that’s the point I’m trying to make.

2. Start watching the substrate meaning agent traffic, multi-agent benchmarks, inter-model API calls and reports of capabilities that no single model in a pipeline has but the pipeline does. These are what we really need to look out for.

3. Update your definition of “AGI” and stop expecting it to be this singular, embodied, willed, or named thing. If your mental model of AGI looks like a face on a screen, you are looking for the wrong thing. This swarm does not have a face or a name.

4. Take emergence seriously as a category and as a real physical phenomenon that has produced every intelligent thing on Earth so far, and that has now been handed a substrate that runs a million times faster than biology, but with no natural predators (not even the killswitch guy)

5. Hold two things at once because it is indeed possible that none of this happens and that I’m just yapping. It is also possible that all of it has already happened and we just haven’t notice at all because we were looking the other way. Both are potential outcomes. Prep for both.

The reason I think we need to have this conversation, in the most practical sense at least, is that the policies, treaties, alignment techniques, and safety frameworks the world is currently building are designed for the singular-AGI scenario.

I see no mention of the swarm scenario.

They are designing it for a thing with a name, a server, a company, and a CEO to wage lawfare on. They will be roughly as effective against the substrate as a fly swatter against a fog bank.

We are actively building locks for the front door of a house that has a thousand windows. And those windows are already widen open.

The interesting thing about every accidental revolution in history from the Turing machine to the internet to penicillin, is that the people who lived through them mostly didn’t notice while it was happening.

They were busy with their families, their jobs and their lives. Maybe once in a while, they’d read the news, which showed them the front door.

I don’t know if the substrate becomes anything. I genuinely don’t. Nobody does, and anyone who tells you they do is selling something on the backend.

What I do know is that the ingredients are present, the loop is closed, the clock-speed is set to seconds, and the scale is approaching numbers that biology took four billion years to reach.

The next time someone tells you what AGI is going to look like, ask them how confident they are that intelligence has to look like anything.

And then go look at the window to see if anything is going on.

It might just be happening then.

– Pascio

Thanks for reading Side Quests!

Side Quests is my weekly field log from the trenches, covering businesses, products, prototypes, launches, growth experiments, acquisitions, weird ideas, and whatever I’m currently trying to figure out.

More often that not, a very stupid side quest turns into something that makes money and this is where I share the process, including the numbers, mistakes and failures along the way.

Subscribe now to join 34,000 other people tagging along for the wild ride!

(or… if you just want to understand how I’m using
Internet Leverage to power and fuel these side quests,
read my personal newsletter Internet Leverage here instead)

Things I am working on outside this, in case any of them are interesting:

1. If you want to build a High Profit One-Person Empire™, read this free article.

2. If you want to grow on Twitter, check out Stanley, my AI Head Of Content.

3. If you want to understand what fuels these experiments, check out Internet Leverage, my personal newsletter where I share weekly insights and essays.

Hi, I am Pascio.

Today, over 370,000 cool people follow my stuff across the internet, and because they do, I’ve made over $1M in personal profit from the businesses I built off the back of that, mostly by myself, and always with my laptop and a (not always so fast) WiFi connection.

For most of that time, I’ve done it being 100% faceless online.

Since this is the first edition of my newsletter Side Quests, I figured a proper reintroduction was overdue. You might read this and wonder: “what the hell am I doing here?”, which, don’t worry, we’ll get to shortly.

Now I know there are many of you reading this who have followed me since the good old days when I was selling Notion templates, some even tracing back to early 2021.

Then there are others who found me through some random viral tweet or Instagram post after that, and probably also a few who have absolutely no idea who I am or why this email has suddenly appeared in their inbox.

So allow me to take you back to the beginning.

We’ll start by taking a quick trip down memory lane so you understand how I ended up where I am, but even more importantly, what I’m doing next (and why that specifically matters to you).

Because lately I’ve found myself back in the very part of internet businessing that I enjoy most: chasing internet rabbit holes, clicking a ton of buttons, building weird shit, and seeing if any of it turns into good ol’ cold hard American dollar bills.

Also summarizes pretty well what this entire newsletter is going to be about.

More on that in a second.

It all started with a sticky note

About four years ago, I wrote a list of my top goals on yellow sticky note.

Later as I got started with my online business, I turned those goals into a tweet and posted it publicly on X for some of that good ol’ juicy accountability:

Admittedly, I still go back and look at that very tweet every once in a while. And more impressively, less than a year after posting the tweet, I had already checked off the first three goals on that list.

I am still working on the fourth to this day.

Before all this, there was very little evidence that any of it was going to happen in the first place if I’m being completely honest. See, I was stuck in this soul-draining 9-to-5 job where I was being forced (or, I mean, I did it willingly, but you know what I mean), to call strangers on the phone all day to try and sell them things they didn’t really want in the first place.

If you’ve ever done any type of outbound sales or telemarketing, you know what I’m talking about when I say “soul-draining”.

Now as a result of the crippling depression that was creeping up on me, I spent most of my free time trying to figure out how the hell people made money online.

I tried a lot of things over the years.

One of my earliest genius business ideas was dropshipping women’s clothes. The rationalization on this was very real, and it was simply because my girlfriend was spending lots of money buying clothes every month, so I reasoned with myself that this niche would definitely be the one to make me filthy rich.

Oh boy, had I only known what I was in for…

I ended up burning around $9,000 running paid ads before eventually accepting that I had created a remarkably efficient system for sending money from my bank account directly to Facebook, and not so much a business that got me paid (lol).

After that experiment, I had no more money to play with.

So I decided to go all in on content, because, well… it was free to create and post.

Problem was that I had never created content before and I had no idea what to create it about, so again, my master rationalization skills came into play when I woke up one day and realized that I could just make a page and talk about my goals.

So, as you know, my goal was to get rich and the result was an Instagram account called “The $1M Project”.

The concept was… exactly what it sounds like.

I was going to publicly document my journey to making a million dollars.

And so I began.

I made lots of content. The actual making money part proved… slightly more difficult.

For around three years, that was more or less my relationship with online business. I would discover something, become convinced I had finally figured it out, spend weeks or months working on it, and eventually move on to the next idea when I failed epicly.

Dropshipping. Instagram pages. Content. Random business models. Whatever rabbit hole looked promising that month.

I had plenty of ambition and very little to show for it.

So, eventually, I gave up entirely.

I decided to just get better at my job. And so I began climbing the corporate ladder instead. I studied sales, improved my skills, closed more deals and got promotion after promotion.

Eventually I realized that while the money got better, the depression didn’t.

So I turned to self improvement as the solution.

If I couldn’t change my life situation, well, the very least I could do was hit the gym.

That journey led me to the most random thing of all times:

Notion.

(or… if you just want to understand how I’m using
Internet Leverage to power and fuel these side quests,
read my personal newsletter Internet Leverage here instead)

The strangest thing changed my life entirely

As I got deeper into the self dev space, I ended up with my life organized in these neat Google Drive folders. One for each, Health, Wealth, Happiness. You know the drill.

And I was proud of this system I’d built. So proud that one day I showed it to my brother who was a university student and an an avid user of Notion.

So he asked me, “why don’t you use Notion for this instead of Google Drive?”

I’d never heard of Notion, but gave it a shot and one weekend later, I was knee deep.

I got completely sucked into it, and started engaging in Notion communities.

Eventually along the way, I came across people that were making surprisingly good money selling templates for it. That caught my attention specifically.

Because if they could do it… why couldn’t I?

The business model was equally attractive. There was almost nothing standing between me and the customer. I could build the product myself, put it on the internet, find people who wanted it, and keep most of the money I made for myself.

So I started a faceless Twitter account from zero and began posting about Notion.

My early tweets got something like two likes each, and I remain fairly confident that both of them were from my mom (thanks mom!)

At the same time, I spent hours studying other successful creators trying to understand what people actually needed and would pay for. So I made systems for productivity, goals, businesses, habits, planning, and basically every other part of life people apparently wanted to organize inside a database.

While everyone shipped a template a month, I was launching one every week.

The first $5 I ever made online came from my first launch.

And I use the word “launch” generously.

It looked ridiculous compared with how I (or half of Tech Twitter) would launch something today but still, someone bought it.

And then someone else. And another person. And another.

Before I knew it, I had made $200 over the course of a few days.

Pocket change, sure. But life-changing in the sense that it changed my life trajectory. And so, my account slowly grew, my products got better each time, and the income started growing at a compounding rate alongside it.

After around six months of hustling and bustling (while still working that 9-5), I hit my first $2,000 month. Then I did it again the month after. And again the next month.

At that point I quit my job and just went all in.

Everyone around me thought I had lost it. Understandable. Because from the outside, I had given up a stable, well paying job, with another promised promotion just about to hit + the yearly 0.5% raise kicking in,

… to spend my days tweeting anonymously from a cartoon character profile about a productivity app and selling digital planners to strangers on the internet.

I sounded ridiculous.

But from where I was sitting, it felt like I had finally found something with momentum after years of trying and failing at everything.

The five bucks kicked things off. The $200 launch made me believe it was possible and the $2k months were the nail in the coffin that told me THIS WAS IT: my way out.

So naturally, I wanted to see how far I could take it.

Turns out people really wanted their lives organized

After quitting my job, I now had 24/7 to ship products and write tweets.

And now that I think about that, that right there, that paragraph, is basically the one-sentence secret to succeeding in an online business with zero prior experience:

Ship products & write tweets 24/7.

My little internet business selling cute Notion templates eventually scaled to $300,000 in profits. And it was still just me, my laptop and Twitter.

The more interesting part was what started happening next.

My Twitter audience kept growing and my email list along with it. And for every new person who entered my world, the next launch became a little easier and more profitable.

Eventually I realized that the templates were only one part of the equation.

The real asset I was building underneath it all was distribution.

Once I understood that, I started stacking other things on top of what I already had.

I built info products. I ran mentorships. I began closing high-ticket clients. I did partnerships and collaborations. I started playing with software, investing, doing acquisitions, and other small and (often weird) internet businesses.

Some things worked incredibly well.

Others quietly disappeared and shall never be spoken of again.

Over time, that $300k from selling templates eventually crossed $1 million in total profit. And somehow, after all of that growth, I am still sitting here happily working from my laptop without a giant organization around me.

Notion kickstarted the thing. Twitter and email scaled it. And everything I learned along the way then opened up a much larger playground.

A playground that I genuinely believe everyone should get a chance to play on.

(or… if you just want to understand how I’m using
Internet Leverage to power and fuel these side quests,
read my personal newsletter Internet Leverage here instead)

The fine print

I think we can agree that the clean version of this story sounds pretty sweet.

It’s also the one I tell at dinner tables and cocktail parties when people ask me what I do and I answer “online business” and they look at me with these weird eyes waiting for me to elaborate.

But you and both know that it’s really just the nice wrapper:

I discovered Notion, started a Twitter account, sold some templates, built an audience, quit my job, and eventually made more than $1 million online.

When you actual unpack it by zooming out a bit, the timeline is much uglier.

I spent 3 years trying random shit online, failing most of it. I burned thousands of dollars. I spent hours and hours making content nobody cared about.

And even then, my ambition started way before any of those failed business attempts.

This is equally important because I have that same tendency today.

I get curious about something, go too deep, start building, and occasionally emerge on the other side with an actual business.

The cool thing is that because I’ve already laid the groundwork, I have a lot more leverage to take bets now:

I have an audience. I have distribution. I have capital. I have experience.

And even cooler, now AI has made it possible for a non-techy guy like me whose only coding skill is Notion formulas, to build things I would have needed a team for a few years ago.

Which makes this a very fun time to start experimenting again, which brings me to…

Welcome to Side Quests

You’re reading Side Quest #1 of Side Quests. My newest lil’ project.

See, over the last few years, Pascio became associated with the things I had already built. I became “The Notion Guy”, which kinda boxed me in and limited my curiosity from exploring beyond it.

Today, I’m already experimenting and testing and fooling around, chasing internet rabbit holes and clicking a whole bunch of buttons to make money appear.

I want Side Quests to be the newsletter that documents that, WHILE it happens.

The easiest way I can describe it is this:

Side Quests is my weekly field log from the trenches. I’ll share the businesses I’m building, products and prototypes I’m shipping, launches, growth experiments, acquisitions, weird ideas, numbers, failures, and whatever I’m currently trying to figure out as I go.

Occasionally, a very stupid side quest turns into something that actually makes money.

That is the fun part.

There are plenty of places online where you can read the polished case study six months later, once somebody knows which decisions were smart and which details should conveniently disappear from the story.

Here, I want to write while I’m still figuring it out.

If I start something on Monday, I might tell you about it on Friday. If I spend money buying some strange internet asset, you’ll get the numbers. If I launch something and nobody cares, that can make the newsletter too, so we can all analyze why it wen’t wrong (after we stop collectively crying about it of course).

And if an experiment suddenly takes off and starts printing dough, you’ll see what happened before I have time to rewrite the story into some genius master plan.

You’ll probably notice a few recurring themes in this newsletter:

Profit & Prototypes will cover the things I’m actually building and my tests to see whether anyone wants to pay for them.

Build Logs will go deeper into active projects, what shipped, what broke, what changed, and where I’m taking them next.

Internet Experiments will be the stranger stuff: distribution ideas, viral mechanics, new channels, weird websites, growth loops, and ideas I’m testing because I want to know what happens when I play with different variables.

I’ll also share the economics when it matters, because why not?

Revenue, costs, traffic, users, valuations, prices, whatever gives you the full picture.

And there will inevitably be rabbit holes that begin with me thinking, “huh, that’s interesting,” and end three days later with twelve browser tabs open and a half-built company.

Those probably deserve their own category, but rest assured, I shall definitely let you know about those too, so you can avoid wasting time and have me do it for you!

(or… if you just want to understand how I’m using
Internet Leverage to power and fuel these side quests,
read my personal newsletter Internet Leverage here instead)

I already have a new side quest

A few days ago, I started building an Apple Watch app.

The original thought was simple. I use different AI agents for different parts of my life and work, and I wanted a way to speak to them directly from my wrist without constantly pulling out my phone.

So I started coding it.

You can see some of that here:

I have no idea yet where it ends up.

It could become a proper product. It could lead me into a much bigger idea. It could end up in the enormous graveyard of things I found fascinating for four days before becoming fascinated by something else.

Either way, that process is exactly what belongs here.

I have a bunch of these experiments going at any given time. Software, content systems, acquisitions, little internet businesses, distribution plays, AI tools, and other things that probably make more sense once I have spent an unreasonable amount of time explaining them.

Side Quests gives me somewhere to document all of it.

And hopefully, seeing it will help you too whether it’s you seeing what to avoid, getting motivated or just copying my moves (permission granted)!

One more important note

There is one other thing I want to explain, because I’m increasingly getting questions about the difference of Pascio vs. Pascal.

@IAmPascio (my faceless brand) is the builder side.

That is where my side quests live. I build things, launch things, experiment, share numbers, chase opportunities, and generally use whatever leverage I have accumulated to see what I can make happen on the internet.

This newsletter, and generally the Pascio brand, belongs to that world.

@CreatorPascal (the real me) is my personal brand.

This is where I go deeper and zoom out on the bigger picture of what building a 7-figure one person internet empire really is like.

I recently renamed that newsletter Internet Leverage.

The question behind it is something I spend a lot of time thinking about:

What becomes possible when one person suddenly has access to distribution, software, AI, capital and a global market?

Over there, I write longer essays about one-person businesses, attention as an asset, AI as leverage, internet-native wealth, ambition, culture and philosophy. More broadly, I’m interested in what happens as technology rewires how we work, think and live, and how you can use those shifts to get ahead.

Some of those essays are practical field guides.

Others are me following an idea until I understand it better.

For whoever reads it, the end goal is giving them an edge.

A way to learn the new rules of internet business while everyone else is still playing by the old ones, spot opportunities earlier, make better bets, and compound that advantage across work, money and life.

That is Internet Leverage by Pascal.

Side Quests by Pascio is much closer to the ground.

One is where I think through the larger ideas and try to make sense of where all of this is going and what I’m learning from it in real-time.

The other is where I open the laptop and actually start fucking around with it and showing you what happens when you do.

And I think it’s a pretty genius move, because they feed each other naturally.

The things I build give me new ideas to think about. The things I think about usually give me another excuse to build something.

It turns out my business and my personality have basically become an infinite side-quest generator.

So... what happens now?

I genuinely don’t know.

That is partly why I wanted to start this first newsletter sidequest.

I’m in a very different position from the guy who was desperately trying to make his first few dollars online. I have distribution, capital, skills, an audience, and most importantly, access to technology that lets one person do things that would have required an entire team back when I started.

I still have the same itch to see what happens if I follow an interesting idea far enough.

Maybe the next side quest becomes another $300,000 template business (I heard Framer templates should be pretty profitable these days?)

Maybe it becomes software (maybe another AI Head of Content like Stanley?)

Maybe I buy something (so far, I’ve only sold some of my businesses, never bought).

Or maybe I build something so stupid that the only responsible thing to do is send you an email about how badly it failed so you can avoid it at all costs.

If you ask me, either of those outcome sounds far more interesting than pretending I already know the ending.

So a few times a week, I’ll come back here and tell you what I’ve been building, testing, launching, buying, breaking, learning, and making money from.

You’ll see the process while it is still messy + the numbers + the failures along the way.

And, if history is any indication of whether I’ll succeed, well, I’m a strong believer that least a handful of these ridiculous rabbit holes should eventually turn into something that can fund my new IRL garden project (srsly, I need me some more tomato plants, the first one I just planted produced… 2 tomatoes).

Welcome to Side Quests.

See you in the next one,

Pascio

Thanks for reading Side Quests!

Side Quests is my weekly field log from the trenches, covering the businesses, products, prototypes, launches, growth experiments, acquisitions, weird ideas, and whatever else I’m currently trying to figure out.

More often that not, a very stupid side quest turns into something that makes money and this letter is where I share the entire process, including the numbers, mistakes and failures along the way.

Subscribe now to join 34,000 other people tagging along for the wild ride!

(or click here to read a few editions first)

Things I am working on outside this, in case any of them are interesting:

1. If you want to build a High Profit One-Person Empire™, read this free article.

2. If you want to grow on Twitter, check out Stanley, my AI Head Of Content.

3. If you want to understand what fuels these experiments, check out Internet Leverage, my personal newsletter where I share weekly insights and essays.