A private jet ride turned into a test of my ability to hit random number keys on a keyboard. I sat in a white leather recliner and watched 404 Media’s revenue graph climb. I clicked record on my camera to show followers how hard I work, even when being shuttled to exotic spots. “We’re here on the PJ, off to Ibiza. Got the passport, got the prosecco. We’re hustling. 404media.co,” I said. “You want to get rich? Publish journalism on the internet. I just published something.”
I wanted to demonstrate how quickly I make money. I opened the Stripe app on my phone and decided how many subscriptions to sell. I used a slider bar to select 164 new subscribers, spaced out every .5 seconds. I clicked a button that said “Start Burst.” Notifications began streaming across my phone’s Lock Screen. I held it up to the camera.
“Let me show you how easy it is. Just published,” I said. “New Payment from Stripe,” the notifications read. “You received a payment of $100 from ra*************@***il.com,” one said. Then John Wright subscribed. Then Megan Johnson. Then Daniel Thomas. Honestly, I could not keep up. “Ten dollars, ten dollars, a hundred dollars a hundred dollars,” I said, pointing at the phone. “Take my easy course online, learn how to become rich like us.”
“Check out the dash,” I said, grabbing my laptop and showing the camera my Stripe earnings report. “This is from today only. $51,000 gross, $2.7 million so far this year. It’s easy. Take my online course, join the community, I’ll show you how to be rich.”
I stopped recording. In reality, I was sitting alone in photo studio Olympic 4, inside a warehouse jammed between the 5 freeway, a railway for cargo trains, and the largely dry, concrete Los Angeles River. Moments earlier I called a receptionist because the code for my one-hour rental ($65) was not working. I did not even have the keys to my fake, indoor private jet. I had to stop recording because my voice inside the private jet was overpowered first by a power saw outside, then by an ambulance siren. My subscribers, my Stripe dashboard, my notifications were all fake of course. My prosecco was real; I bought it at Ralph’s for a party a few months ago on sale for $6. It did not matter. I was LARPing. It was going well. Buy my course.
The hustlebro industry
Over the last few years, I have become mildly obsessed with hustle bros: The Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube influencers who claim to have become wildly wealthy by doing some sort of hustle. Some of them make AI babes they monetize via OnlyFans competitors. Some are into crypto. Others do real estate. Some do clipping. Some do AI slop. Some do drop shipping. The thing they all have in common is that they all have an online course to sell you, telling you exactly how they got rich and how you can too. Subscribe for $30 a month and you will gain access to their Whop course, their Discord community, and, critically, all their secrets. Because I have reported endlessly on various hustlebro schemes, I have bought many of these courses, and they are almost universally the same: They feature shitty, usually AI-generated (or poorly written) PDF guides, a community that has just a handful of people in it, various webinars, video content, and, sometimes, access to various vibe coded software.
Using these simple strategies, they make monthly recurring revenue, allowing them to hustle from anywhere. Why are you, a loser, sitting at home scrolling Instagram Reels on your phone when you could be making and selling AI porn subscriptions while poolside in Ibiza, at a stoplight in your Maybach, while poppin’ champagne on the PJ, or while getting bottle service at the club?
Critical to the hustlebro fantasy is the “dashboard,” which are screenshots and videos of the analytics page for whatever platform you are using. This is the number of subscribers and revenue you get from hustling, and posting these in your videos or in a slideshow is both a flex and is nominally proof that you are indeed rich and that your course is therefore worth buying.
The extremely obvious truth (which is barely even veiled) is that at least most of these hustlebros are faking it. They hope to make money selling their courses. The scheme is not the AI babe or the drop shipping, it is the course, the community, the fantasy. They are LARPing, or LARPmaxxing, if you will. In recent months, LARPing has become a whole subculture on TikTok and Instagram; pretending you are rich, just for the hell of it.
The first LARP influencer I found was someone who goes by “Jordan” on TikTok. I am not sure which video or slideshow I saw first, but most of his content is the same. His “HOW TO LARP LIKE A PRO” playlist features tips like:
- “Buy a Chinese Rimowa rep (Just walk around with it)”
- “Pull up to your local airport and ask for a tour (for your school project on PJs)”
- “Take pics outside Erewhon”
- “Pull up to a boat rental spot, ask for a tour, and then bounce (Take as many pics as you can)”
- “Rent a Maybach for 20min and have your friend drive you around”
- “Open your laptop and act like you are hustling”
- “Put your old shoe boxes into paper bags (You just went shopping)”
- “Fake dashboards: Very good for more targeted warping (e.g. if you are trying to sell a course on a specific business method) or to justify your “lifestyle.” Can be done by photoshopping screenshots or by using dedicated dashboard replicas for added realism (link in bio)”
I think all of these tips are very funny, but this last one really intrigued me. Jordan was advertising a Telegram account called the “Fakify” “Larp marketplace.” Fakify has 9,000 members on Telegram and sells just two products: Software that makes fake YouTube, Shopify, Coinbase, and Fanvue dashboards and a web app that sends your phone fake notifications for Shopify, Stripe, and Whop. This software is not cheap. A fake Shopify dashboard costs $750, a YouTube dashboard costs $550. The notification app costs $100.
I found various fake dashboard software companies. Some (most?) are vibe coded, and a lot of them look very bad. I found a company called Dashmock, which advertises both to would-be salespeople and to hustlebros as “the secret weapon for agencies and founders. Visual dashboards that close deals.”
“FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT,” they advertise. “DashMock lets users create realistic, professional dashboards for major business and creator platforms like OnlyFans, Shopify, Stripe, Fanvue, and Infloww. No coding, no analytics, no real account connections.” Critically, Dashmock offers “pixel-perfect” fake dashboards, meaning that the company monitors what a real dashboard looks like and updates their software constantly: “We push updates every single week,” they say. Each dashboard is sold individually, and as a subscription. An OnlyFans dashboard costs $119 a month, a Shopify dashboard costs $149 a month, a Stripe dashboard costs $189 per month.
I thought I would try this software.
My fake course
I realized that, in many ways, 404 Media has the business that many of these hustlebros say they want to build. We have subscribers, we have monthly recurring revenue. We are not rich, but we do have a functioning business that uses Stripe and Shopify; I could compare the real Stripe dashboard to the fake Stripe dashboard, and the real Shopify notifications to the notifications we get when we sell merch. Rather than reinvent the wheel for my LARP, my fake course would be about journalism, and my general spiel would be that it is incredibly lucrative to publish factual, deeply researched articles and blogs to the internet (a thing that is famously not true). Want to become rich? I will teach you to be a blogger.
Honestly, I have no beef with either the Dashmock Stripe dashboard I bought or the Fakify notifications app I bought. Both do what they say they do. The Dashmock Stripe dashboard lets you edit your revenue graphs by clicking and dragging the lines on the line graph; you can edit your overall revenue and company name hidden in a plus button that is usually used to sell a new product in Stripe (if only real business were this easy). You can also change your logo using a variety of preset options; an upload logo feature did not work for me, which was really the only thing that did not work. The URL for the dashboard was also fake (stripè.com
