I wanted one place for my material. Books, podcasts, short essays and the work people were paying to access. Somehow that simple requirement kept turning into a collection of expensive platforms, restrictions and awkward compromises.
This episode is the July 2021 announcement of what became my Hustler Vault project. It records what I intended to build at the time. The launch schedule and membership arrangements discussed in the recording are historical, rather than the terms of the website you are reading now.
What still interests me is the reason I decided to build it. I had a problem I understood because I kept running into it myself.
Start with the irritation
Different services handled different parts of the business. Video hosting had its own costs and restrictions. Public platforms gave me distribution but limited what I could do. Paid content and free material didn't sit together in the way I wanted.
There was also the frustration of people copying the work. You spend time making something, somebody else passes it around and then tells you that you should be grateful for the exposure. Very generous of him, considering he wasn't the one doing the work.
I wanted to serve the people who supported it and put it into practice. That meant thinking carefully about what was public, what belonged in the paid material and how the two fitted together.
The answer I explored was a platform I could customise. It would begin with the formats I thought I could handle and leave more expensive video hosting for later. That was already a useful constraint. I did not need to solve every media problem before making a working first version.
Build something you can use
By then I had spent roughly a year learning to code. I thought I had enough skill to attempt the platform. Whether other people would find it as useful as I did was a separate question, and I said so.
That distinction matters in business. Understanding your own frustration gives you a starting point. It does not establish that everybody else wants your answer. You still have to build something, use it and find out whether it solves the problem you thought it would solve.
I wanted a working model. Perfection could wait. In the episode I describe holding back some new material while I built the place where I wanted to put it. That was a tradeoff, because time spent on the platform was time I couldn't spend publishing.
Make room for the writing
Alongside this, I had been writing short essays I called Tony's Notes. Writing helped me digest what I was thinking about. The subjects went beyond seduction into observations about life more generally.
I wanted somewhere those pieces could sit alongside the podcasts and books. The broader direction was already there. Game remained part of the work, but it wasn't the only thing I wanted to discuss.
If you are considering a business of your own, pay attention to recurring problems you understand in detail. Describe what is wrong, what the existing options fail to do and what a small working answer would look like. Then build enough to test that answer. Being irritated is easy. Making something useful out of the irritation is where the work starts.
