Feel free to ask questions in the comment section. for the next 72 hours.
Intro
I got a ton of new followers on X and subscribers here on Substack after the below Tweet last week.
As always, many are extremely skeptical, so they never start.
Here’s what I wish I knew when I started and how I’d approach the game in 2026 as a newbie, if I wanted to earn $10K+ within my first 12 month.
Read
I’d take an entire weekend to read every single Substack post I’ve ever published.
Starting from the very first one in late 2022 until now.
Many of those old posts aren’t relevant at all and those old plays no longer work.
But it’s crucial to understand the history of the game, and identify common patterns and themes.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Most Basic Overview
Here’s the most basic overview of our game:
We earn tens of thousands of dollars per year, by taking out multiple credit cards and earning large sign up bonuses.
These sign up bonuses are earned by hitting a minimum spend requirement on that card. For example, $3,000 after spending $20K+ on an Amex Business Platinum card within the first 90 days of opening the card.
That’s it.
That’s really the meat and potatoes of this game.
Sure category spend (like 4X on restaurants) is also good, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the amount you can earn through signup bonuses.
In the above example ($3,000 after spending $20K) that’s literally a 15% return.
Not many other places you can get that!
Business Owners vs Manufactured Spenders
Whenever I explain the game, I always hear the same objection right away. “But who spends $20K+ in 3 months?”
There’s two types of players in this game.
Those that have a business in which they are spending thousands of dollars each month on inventory, ads, supplies, etc…
And those that will need to resort to “manufactured spending.”
The biz owners have a huge advantage as they simply have to learn the basics of this game, and they don’t have to worry at all about how to generate spending.
Biz owners literally just need to optimize a few things, figure out which cards there going to get and then just do a bunch of applications and the rest is plug and play.
Manufactured Spenders (the vast majority of the Slack group) will need to learn and develop enough methods to consistently hit the large minimum spending thresholds.
If you had to choose?
This game is infinitely easier if you have an existing business.
But if you can spend a little bit of time learning manufactured spending you can still do just as well.
Manufactured Spending
The most simple way to put this is…
You’re spending money and somehow getting the money back into your bank account ASAP.
Some examples: