2MatthewFreemanAdmin
OG II: the ones who show the bad months
The first piece about the OGs was about the twenty-five-year people — the ones who worked the craft out in the dark before any of it had a name.
This one’s about a different sort, and I think they matter just as much.
Not the veterans. The ones who went full-time about ten years ago, built an audience while they were doing it, and then did the thing almost nobody does.
They filmed the bad months.
WHY THAT’S RARER THAN IT SOUNDS
Think about what the incentive actually is. You’ve got an audience. The videos that do numbers are the hauls — the £2 find that went for £180, the boot sale where everything came good. That’s the content that gets shared.
So the whole gravity of the thing pulls one way: show the wins, bury the rest. And most people follow it, which is why the internet is full of reselling that looks like a cheat code.
The ones worth listening to went the other way. Sales collapsed this quarter — here’s the graph. This is the hardest it’s ever been — here’s why. The platform shut my account and I don’t know why either. A day in the actual job, which is four hours of packing and a sandwich over the laptop.
That isn’t modesty. It’s the most useful thing anyone in this trade has ever published, and it costs them views to do it.
WHAT IT’S WORTH TO THE PERSON WATCHING
If all you ever see is wins, then when your own month goes bad — and it will — you have exactly one explanation available: I must be rubbish at this.
That’s the damage. Not the lost money. The private conclusion that everyone else has cracked it and you’re the only one drowning.
One person showing you a quarter where it went wrong takes that conclusion off the table. You find out it’s the trade, not you. You find out January is like that for everybody, that a platform can go quiet for reasons nobody outside it understands, that full-time doesn’t mean comfortable.
Honesty about a bad month is a mental health intervention dressed up as a business video. I don’t think the people doing it always realise that’s what they’re doing.
AND THE AI BIT, WHICH IS NOT WHAT YOU’D EXPECT
Here’s what I find genuinely interesting about this generation, and it’s the opposite of the noise.
They’re using the tools. AI listing writers, cross-posting software, all of it — quietly, in the background, because it saves them two hours a day. It’s in the description box under the video. No manifesto.
What they are almost entirely not doing is having opinions about AI in public. No think-pieces. No “the future of reselling”. No fear, no evangelism. They picked up a thing that saved time, the same way they picked up a label printer, and got on with the job.
I keep coming back to that, because the loudest voices on AI in selling are mostly people who don’t sell. The ones actually doing forty listings a day have quietly worked out which bits help and which bits are rubbish, and they’ve done it by trying them on real stock with real money at stake.
That’s the expertise nobody is collecting. Not “is AI good for sellers”. Which specific thing saved you twenty minutes on Tuesday, and which one wrote you a title so bad you had to redo it.
WHAT WE DO WITH THAT HERE
Same principle as the first piece, pointed at a different generation.
The bad months are worth writing down, and so is the boring verdict on a tool. That’s precisely the knowledge that never makes it into a video — too dull, too specific, no thumbnail in it — and precisely the knowledge that saves the next person a fortnight.
So: this is a good place to be unimpressive in.
Nobody’s building a personal brand on here. There’s no algorithm to feed. Which makes it about the only place left where the honest version is the easy thing to post.
YOUR TURN
What’s your worst month, and what did you learn from it?
Not the recovery story. The month itself.
Whoever reads it at two in the morning, convinced they’re the only one, will owe you one.
Second in a series about the people this trade was built by. Like the first one, it names nobody deliberately — these are archetypes drawn from a generation, not a profile of anyone in particular.
This one’s about a different sort, and I think they matter just as much.
Not the veterans. The ones who went full-time about ten years ago, built an audience while they were doing it, and then did the thing almost nobody does.
They filmed the bad months.
WHY THAT’S RARER THAN IT SOUNDS
Think about what the incentive actually is. You’ve got an audience. The videos that do numbers are the hauls — the £2 find that went for £180, the boot sale where everything came good. That’s the content that gets shared.
So the whole gravity of the thing pulls one way: show the wins, bury the rest. And most people follow it, which is why the internet is full of reselling that looks like a cheat code.
The ones worth listening to went the other way. Sales collapsed this quarter — here’s the graph. This is the hardest it’s ever been — here’s why. The platform shut my account and I don’t know why either. A day in the actual job, which is four hours of packing and a sandwich over the laptop.
That isn’t modesty. It’s the most useful thing anyone in this trade has ever published, and it costs them views to do it.
WHAT IT’S WORTH TO THE PERSON WATCHING
If all you ever see is wins, then when your own month goes bad — and it will — you have exactly one explanation available: I must be rubbish at this.
That’s the damage. Not the lost money. The private conclusion that everyone else has cracked it and you’re the only one drowning.
One person showing you a quarter where it went wrong takes that conclusion off the table. You find out it’s the trade, not you. You find out January is like that for everybody, that a platform can go quiet for reasons nobody outside it understands, that full-time doesn’t mean comfortable.
Honesty about a bad month is a mental health intervention dressed up as a business video. I don’t think the people doing it always realise that’s what they’re doing.
AND THE AI BIT, WHICH IS NOT WHAT YOU’D EXPECT
Here’s what I find genuinely interesting about this generation, and it’s the opposite of the noise.
They’re using the tools. AI listing writers, cross-posting software, all of it — quietly, in the background, because it saves them two hours a day. It’s in the description box under the video. No manifesto.
What they are almost entirely not doing is having opinions about AI in public. No think-pieces. No “the future of reselling”. No fear, no evangelism. They picked up a thing that saved time, the same way they picked up a label printer, and got on with the job.
I keep coming back to that, because the loudest voices on AI in selling are mostly people who don’t sell. The ones actually doing forty listings a day have quietly worked out which bits help and which bits are rubbish, and they’ve done it by trying them on real stock with real money at stake.
That’s the expertise nobody is collecting. Not “is AI good for sellers”. Which specific thing saved you twenty minutes on Tuesday, and which one wrote you a title so bad you had to redo it.
WHAT WE DO WITH THAT HERE
Same principle as the first piece, pointed at a different generation.
The bad months are worth writing down, and so is the boring verdict on a tool. That’s precisely the knowledge that never makes it into a video — too dull, too specific, no thumbnail in it — and precisely the knowledge that saves the next person a fortnight.
So: this is a good place to be unimpressive in.
- The month it went wrong, and what you think happened
- The tool everyone raves about that did nothing for you
- The thing you tried that actually did save you time, however small
- The number that embarrassed you
Nobody’s building a personal brand on here. There’s no algorithm to feed. Which makes it about the only place left where the honest version is the easy thing to post.
YOUR TURN
What’s your worst month, and what did you learn from it?
Not the recovery story. The month itself.
Whoever reads it at two in the morning, convinced they’re the only one, will owe you one.
Second in a series about the people this trade was built by. Like the first one, it names nobody deliberately — these are archetypes drawn from a generation, not a profile of anyone in particular.
- Question
- Active discussion
- Answer emerging
- Community solution
- Knowledge article