How I became a digital nomad by selling to gooners

I'm assuming some of you got here from my reddit post, and the rest of you found this because you want to be a digital nomad working remotely and creating AI influencers. Either way, this is the long version of it.

Quick recap for everyone else. Two years ago I got laid off from a software engineering job in Vancouver that paid a bit over 150k. I spent most of the year after that failing at everything I tried. Dropshipping, trading, the whole list of things people tell you to do when you have savings and no job. The options part is the one I am least proud of. I was not running spreads or hedging anything, I was buying weeklies off wallstreetbets screenshots like every other degenerate in that sub. The market opens at 6:30 on the west coast, so I was awake at 6:15 every morning with a phone in my hand and nothing else in the calendar. Green day and I was a genius. Red day and I sized up. That ran for about six months and cost me close to half of what I had, and it took most of those six months to be able to say out loud that it was not trading, it was a gambling habit with a ticker on it.

What pulled me out of it was r/StableDiffusion. I had already been generating images locally on my own machine because I found it interesting, and I kept running into people there who were quietly making real money with AI influencers. Not brand deals, that side of it pays badly. The ones actually making money were running AI characters on subscription platforms and pulling 10k to 20k a month, and a few of them were doing six figures once they scaled past one character.

I had the technical half of that already. What I did not have was any idea how marketing, audience growth or selling to a real person actually works, and that turned out to be the hard half. It took me most of a year to get right.

Today I run it full time from Seoul and I clear around 10k a month. In korea or japan or thailand that goes roughly as far as 20k would back in north america, which is the part that makes the number liveable rather than impressive.

This post is the actual process I use. Every step, in the order I do it, with the specific tools and the specific mistakes that cost me money. There is no motivational section and I am not going to tell you it is passive income, because the part that makes the money is the part where you sit there and work.

Two things to get out of the way before we start.

The first is that this is a real job. The generation side is maybe a third of the work. The rest is posting every single day and talking to people, and if you are looking for something that runs itself this is the wrong business.

The second is that you have to be honest with yourself about the ethics of this before you start, not halfway in. It is a degenerate business and I am not going to dress that up. You will spend your working day typing to lonely, horny men who believe they are talking to a woman who does not exist. You will get good at it, faster than you expect. It does not get less strange either, you just stop noticing, and there are still nights where I sit there at 2am and wonder what I am doing with my life.

Some people are completely fine with all of that. Some people find out in month two that they are not, and by then they have already paid for the GPU time. I sat with it for a while and landed on doing it, but I would rather you decide now than three months and a few hundred dollars deep.

Everything below is what I would tell myself two years ago.

Before any of the technical stuff, you need the shape of the thing in your head, because almost everyone who tries this gets it wrong in the same way.

There are three steps and they are not equally important.

Step one is a public account on instagram, tiktok, reddit or X. Reels, photo posts, threads, free, nothing explicit. This is the only part of the operation a stranger ever sees and it has exactly one job, which is to get somebody to tap the link in the bio. It is not there to be liked and it is not there to build a brand.

Step two is the subscription platform, and this is the part people misunderstand. The monthly subscription is not the product. It is a filter. What you are actually buying with that subscription price is the information that this specific person is willing to take out a card and pay for something. That is worth far more than the subscription fee itself.

You only talk to people who already paid, because you already know they spend money. Everything gets sold here.

There is a full section on how the chatting actually goes further down, because it is the part that took me longest to learn. For now the only thing you need is what it is. It is not flirting for hours. It is a paced conversation that ends in a sale, and then another one, and the people who are good at it treat it like a shift rather than a hobby.

Here is an example screenshot of the chat in Fanvue when someone actually pays in the message.

This is a full chat log that I created by exporting the conversation into html

aiorbust-chat.pages.dev/fan-a-preview/

Here is the actual breakdown of every dollar one of my characters has earned so far, straight off the platform dashboard.

Messages and tips both come out of the DMs, so 90% of the revenue is made in step three. Subscriptions and renewals together are 9%. I run several characters now and the exact percentages move around between them, but the shape never does. The DMs are always the business.

Sit with that for a second, because it means the thing every beginner obsesses over, the follower count, is upstream of about a tenth of the money. I spent my first four months doing exactly that. I was posting constantly, the follower count went up, and I was making close to nothing, because I was treating the chat as an afterthought instead of as the job.

There are two ways to set the account up, and the one you pick decides how you spend your day.

The first is to leave it free. No monthly price, anyone can subscribe, anyone can message you. Your subscriber count climbs fast, it looks great in a screenshot, and your inbox fills up with people who are never going to spend a cent. That on its own is not the problem. The problem is that you cannot tell them apart from buyers until you have already given them twenty minutes.

The second is to put a monthly price on it. You get fewer subscribers, and every single one of them has pulled out a card and paid you something before you type a word to them.

I run the second one, and it took me far too long to switch.

Look at the split again. Subscriptions and renewals together are 9% of what I make. If I was setting that price in order to earn from the price, it would be a laughable business. That is not what it is for. I am giving up on 91% of my revenue coming from the front door, in exchange for knowing that everybody who walks through it is real.

Your real constraint is not followers. It is hours in the chat.

There are only so many of them in a day, and every hour you spend on somebody who was never going to buy is an hour you did not spend on somebody who would have. A free account does not shave a percentage off your income. It fills the only scarce thing you have with people who cannot convert.

So, in practice. Put a price on the account. I personally put it high enough that someone who already likes the character pays without really thinking about it, high enough that it needs a real card. It is a turnstile, not a revenue line.

The generation platforms get a full section further down, but there is one decision worth making before you spend a cent, because it is the mistake that costs money on day one.

Do not generate on higgsfield or openart. Both of them will block anything even slightly uncensored, and you find that out after you have bought credits rather than before. I burned a few hundred dollars on that lesson.

Use the KIE platform instead. It runs the same models, seedance and minimax included, without the filter tripping on work that is nowhere near explicit.

That is the overview. This post should leave you with a clear picture of how the business actually works and where the money in it comes from.

What it does not give you is the part you are probably still stuck on. How to pick a niche. The exact route from a post somebody scrolls past to a subscriber who pays. How the nsfw images and videos actually get made, which I cannot show you here. And exactly which tools to use at each of those steps, because the wrong one costs you a month.

That is what the discord is for and you can DM me about it.