confession thread, lighter one. what’s the dumbest thing you’ve spent money on chasing this dream? mine: a 2k mentorship course early on that was ten hours of stuff already free on this forum and youtube. paid for confidence i could’ve gotten by just starting. what’s yours?
ok but counterpoint, i’ve spent on courses that genuinely changed things for me. the trick is who’s teaching. that said, my dumb one: bought a done-for-you site setup that turned out to be a broken theme and a folder of stock photos. paid a grand and then built it myself anyway. still bitter.
a domain i was certain was genius and never built. still renew it every year out of pure sunk-cost stubbornness. it’s been eight years. worth nothing and i can’t let go. that’s my confession, i’m the mark.
paid a guru for a traffic strategy that turned out to be just buy this pop network, which was of course an affiliate link to their own referral. the strategy was earning them a commission off me. that one taught me to check who the advice actually pays before i act on it.
i’ve got three of those, domains i was dead sure about and never touched. also almost dropped 3k on a mentorship when i started and a guy here told me to just start and ask questions instead. best money i never spent.
paying a guru for a strategy that’s free on forums like this is such a common confession because the guru is selling the packaging, not the information. the actual strategy is nearly always out there for free from people with nothing to sell you. what they charge for is the confidence and the shortcut feeling, and they don’t really deliver either. i wasted money on exactly this early on, a course whose whole content i later found scattered across free threads written by working operators. read the free forums first, properly, before you pay anyone, because you’ll usually find you already had access to what they’re selling.
The never-built domain is probably the most relatable confession in the thread, because almost everyone has a graveyard of them. You get convinced a domain is genius, buy it in a flush of excitement, and then it sits in your registrar account for years, quietly renewing, while the site you were definitely going to build never happens. The real cost isn’t one domain fee, it’s the pile of renewals on a whole portfolio of someday-projects. Buying the domain isn’t starting the project, it just feels like it.
this is one of the most common dumb-money stories precisely because it feels smart. paying for expertise seems reasonable, and the guru sells exactly the shortcut a struggling operator wants to buy. but the genuinely valuable knowledge is rarely sold as a secret method, it comes out of running your own small tests, not from a course that wraps generic advice in a bit of urgency.
Well, the domain isn’t really the waste. A domain is ten bucks. What you paid for was the feeling of starting something, and then you never started it. The drawer of unbuilt domains is just a record of ideas you talked yourself into and never shipped.
seen this one more than any other. what the guru sells is hope, not an edge. the “secret strategy” is almost always generic stuff you’d have tested your way into for free. real expertise never has to be sold as a secret.
yeah this is the one thread i’d point another beginner at. everyone’s wasted money is basically a list of the stuff that’s gonna look smart to me next month, the course, the tool i won’t open, the domain i won’t build. way cheaper to borrow their regret than add my own later.
dumbest money i spent was a premium theme i then spent two weekends fighting instead of launching. the theme was fine. i was just hiding from shipping. we all do it.
dumbest money was over-building a custom player before i had an audience to use it. spent weeks on a thing nobody was there to watch. should have licensed something boring and spent that time getting people to the site.
mine was a turnkey tube site i bought that turned out to be a dead script with stolen content stapled onto it. paid way too much and then spent more cleaning it up than building fresh would have cost. lesson learned. now i escrow everything and ask for real proof before a cent moves.