5 Things We Loved This Week

1. When Multilevel Marketing Met Gen Z

"Time reported last year that consumer complaints to the FTC about MLM companies have been on the rise, and if you search for any MLM that was popular two or three years ago on YouTube, you may see a wall of text like this: “Ex Beachbody Coach EXPOSES THE TRUTH,” “Why I Stopped Selling Younique | THE TEA,” “THE TRUTH ABOUT MONAT | Pyramid scheme? Hair loss? Free car? Why did I quit?”

2. How an Excel TikToker manifested her way to making six figures a day

"Kat Norton is a Microsoft Excel influencer. She has over a million followers on TikTok and Instagram, where she goes by the name Miss Excel, and she’s leveraged that into a software training business that is now generating up to six figures of revenue a day. That’s six figures a day. And she’s only been doing this since June 2020.

Kat is a one-woman operation, with no staff or management layer. She uses her iPhone and consumer software to make her videos, and I’ve got to say, she has one of the healthiest relationships with the social platforms of maybe any creator I’ve ever talked to: she thinks of them purely as marketing channels for the video courses she sells elsewhere. That’s a big flip from the traditional creator business model, which is usually aimed at monetizing the platforms directly. Kat’s just not doing that."

3. The escalating costs of being single in America

"Single people should, in theory, be the purest embodiment of American values of self-sufficiency and individualism. That they’re not speaks to the fact that we don’t venerate the individual — we venerate the individual family. The family fosters the conditions for the individual’s success: The spouse helps create the conditions that make success possible; children (at least theoretically) keep the individual grounded, focused, and humble. Which is why so many narratives of “individual” success either start with that family already firmly in place or — as is the case with so many rom-coms and memoirs, from Sex in the City to How to Be Single — end there."

4. How TikTok influencers are rebranding the pitbull

"The #pitbull hashtag has amassed over 17 billion views, and is dominated by dogs (though some of the tags refer to the musician Pitbull.)"

"Pitbulls are dogs with a public relations problem. Although the breed has a temperament rating of 87.4 percent, higher than both German shepherds and Golden Retrievers, it is often associated with violence. That’s because pitbulls are often pitted against each other in dog-fighting rings, a situation that led PETA to dub the breed “the most abused dogs on earth.”

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5. How I Set Income Goals Using Post-Its

"The Post It Method is basically using Post It’s to organize the goals in your head and the steps needed to achieve. It’s like a pre-Kanban – where you identify all the things you want to do before implementing it in a process."

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