Dan Koe, the Doomsday Saint: From Anti-Success Learning to a Success Master

Original title: "Dan Koe, Saint of the End Times: From Anti-Success to Success Guru"
Original author: Sleepy

Dan Koe has published another article, "The most lucrative AI business to start in 2027."

Dan Koe's new article original post | Image source: X

He says the most lucrative AI business in 2027 is being a "one-person creative team" for others—interviewing clients, using AI to dig through their past viral hits, and producing enough content to last half a year. For the first client, charging $2,500 to $5,000 per month is realistic.

At the end of the article, he's selling a $49 writing workshop.

This is the 27th article he's published this year. It's been nearly ten months since the one that broke him out of his niche.

Dan Koe, born in 1996, American, talks about personal growth and one-person companies on X, YouTube, and Instagram—his Instagram alone has 1.7 million followers.

The breakout piece was published on January 12, 2026: "How to fix your entire life in 1 day." As of now, it has 250 million impressions on X.

Viral article original post | Image source: X

After the article went viral, the Chinese internet immediately picked it up—bilingual side-by-sides, ten-thousand-word deep reads, "I followed it for 30 days." He began to be called the "godfather of one-person companies."

From May 2021 to today, he has published 262 articles on his newsletter, over 800,000 English words—roughly one and a half copies of War and Peace. I read every single one.

The earliest was published on May 12, 2021, titled "Why Self-Help Is Ruining Your Life."

Self-Help is a dedicated category in the English-speaking world—from Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, any book, course, or speech that teaches people to change themselves falls under it. In the Chinese context, it roughly encompasses success literature and inspirational chicken soup. Translated into Chinese, this title would be something like "Why Chicken Soup and Success Literature Are Ruining Your Life."

He said many people read such books just for the dopamine rush of the moment—what he calls "mental masturbation"—and that merely reading this stuff won't change your life.

Today, at the bottom of that article's page, there are links to his book and paid membership.

Someone who started by critiquing success literature became, five years later, one of the most successful success writers of this era. What happened in between? Why these five years, why him, why do so many people need him?

Sunday School

Dan Koe rarely talks directly about his family, but fragments from over two hundred articles are enough to sketch an outline.

He grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormonism. On Sundays, he wore black slacks and a white shirt, tied a tie given by his father, and went to church, singing "I Am a Child of God" in Sunday School (the church's Sunday class for children).

Latter-day Saints—"Latter days" originally means "the last days." The church believes that people can progress eternally until they become gods.

The fifth president, Lorenzo Snow, had a famous saying: "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be."

This doctrine failed to convince that child.

He later wrote that as a kid he was "very judgmental," always feeling that people around him had been brainwashed. When he asked friends at church if they truly believed, they would instinctively shrink back, a "glitch" flashing in their eyes, as if their thoughts had been bounced back to the script implanted by their parents. Asking adults yielded similar answers: "Just have faith."

He set a rule for himself: do the opposite of everyone else.

Before college, his parents divorced, and the family's finances suddenly tightened. At eighteen, he was told to choose a major he would work in for forty years. Years later, he began an article with this line: "I was lied to as a child. I have a feeling you were too."

During five years at Arizona State University, he changed majors about five times and made many attempts at internet entrepreneurship, though each was shorter-lived than the last. He sent 50 emails as a Facebook ad agent and signed zero clients; his online store selling rave clothing (the kind worn at EDM festivals) spent $100 on ads and sold only one sequined bra.

At his lowest point, he was crammed into a house with seven other guys, keeping rent down to three or four hundred dollars a month, working odd jobs at a print shop, and $8,000 in debt. Five years in, no degree, but tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. In his autobiography, he summed up that moment in a single word: doomed.

What pulled him out of the muck was Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. During those years he also left the church, studied religion, read anti-religious books, and eventually turned to Ken Wilber and Spiral Dynamics—two frameworks that divide human consciousness into levels, climbing rung by rung, and call God "Source."

With nowhere left to turn, he did something he would later keep telling others not to do: he got a job.

At a web design company, he learned how an agency operates. After hours, he took on side work building sales landing pages—funnels, in English—with rates climbing from $1,500 a job all the way to $2,500 to $5,000. Once he had enough clients, he quit.

He later recalled that his original wish was simply to be able to afford a Chipotle lunch every day.

That's an American Mexican fast-food chain—roughly the equivalent, back home, of achieving Shaxian Delicacies freedom.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James divided people into the "once-born" and the "twice-born." The once-born are naturally optimistic and go with the flow; the twice-born must first fall into the abyss, experience division and despair, then rely on some force to turn things around. The twice-born, as a rule, become the most fervent missionaries.

Dan Koe later boiled life change down to three stages: dissonance, uncertainty, discovery. That article with 250 million impressions was meant to walk readers through all three steps in a single day—answer fifteen questions in the morning, write out an "anti-vision," the kind of life you least want to live, and let that pain push you forward.

Conviction of sin, crisis, grace. Put another way, that's a conversion.

The Wave

His preaching started on Twitter in 2019.

The timing was uncanny. A few months later the pandemic hit, and everyone was trapped in front of screens; in November 2021, 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs in a single month, and the "Great Resignation" became the narrative of the year. Before that, Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek and Naval's line about "productizing yourself" had already turned escaping the cubicle into a generational dream.

Lei Jun said that even a pig can fly if it stands in the right wind—crude but true.

Of course, Dan Koe has his craft: clear content frameworks, short sentences, precise hooks, and consistent output. He deconstructed and reassembled Tolle, Naval, Ferriss, and flow theory, publishing at high frequency during the years when the Twitter algorithm was most generous. With just a few hundred followers, he launched his first course teaching people freelancing, selling about $3,000 a month.

Income quickly climbed. By his account, he earned $100,000 in 2020; in 2022, monthly income hit $50,000 for the first time; in August 2023, he wrote that by age 26 he had $1 million in liquid assets—"until I put half of it into a new company."

The more money he made, the more polished his philosophy became. The clearest example was an article he published in February 2022 about magic mushrooms.

During that period, he microdosed psilocybin once or twice a week. After one dose, he bought a pound of honeycomb at a farmers market and followed the thread downward—how honey is made, how bees relate to plants—until he thought his way into a business.

He called it the "iceberg of opportunity," divided into four layers: appreciation, understanding, mastery, and monetization. The first three layers draw from The Power of Now—quiet the noise in your head, return to the present, be curious like a child. The last layer is the instinct honed at a web design company: almost anything can become income, turned into a product, then scaled into a one-person business.

In a single article, spirituality and business connected. The former makes you believe; the latter makes you pay.

Later, he compressed it all into one mantra: "Solve your own problems and sell the solution."

It sounds airtight. But applied to him, it's a bit like an ouroboros.

His early problem was "how to make money online," and the solution he sold was "teaching you how to make money online." Once buyers learn it, the most natural next step is to keep selling courses online.

That same year, his words grew heavier.

In April, someone mocked young people who pay for online courses to "escape the matrix." "The matrix," from The Matrix, refers in English success-culture circles to the 9-to-5 system—and the loudest voice shouting that slogan was Andrew Tate, an influencer notorious for misogynistic remarks.

Dan Koe responded that he doesn't like Tate, but spending $50 to learn "time-tested monetizable skills" is better than spending $40,000 on an outdated degree.

In July, he wrote that 95% of nine-to-five jobs fit the definition of slavery, ending with a twist on the words from the cross: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

In November, he wrote "Making Money Is Spiritual." In the article, he laid out a list of "unethical skills": sales, marketing, persuasion, hypnosis, influence, and game. Game is slang from the English pickup community, referring to a whole set of techniques for seducing the opposite sex; the abbreviation for this community is PUA.

In his view, the most successful people are those who study unethical means and then use them in ethical ways. In parentheses after the list, he added a note that he teaches all of these in his course Digital Economics, except hypnosis.

As for why one must learn them, his reasoning is that if good people don't do business, bad people will take the positions; making money is reversing entropy.

Over a hundred years ago, Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, explaining how Calvinist believers saw worldly success as a sign of grace, and thus asceticism, diligence, and accumulation inadvertently nurtured capitalism.

With Dan Koe, even that thin veil is torn away; success no longer needs to pretend to be merely a sign of grace.

Making money itself is spiritual practice.

Homiletics

In Christian theology there is a specialized discipline called homiletics, the study of how to deliver a sermon in a sufficiently moving way.

Dan Koe's homiletics can be seen from his word usage. In 800,000 words, "you" appears 29,212 times, while "we" appears only 3,290 times. The most frequent three-word combination is "you don't," 1,346 times; "most people" appears 766 times.

He rarely says "we." He speaks to "you."

On July 3, 2026, he simply wrote a tutorial saying that the most profitable skill of the 21st century is not AI, but understanding human nature. Three chords are taut in the human heart—survival, identity, progress—corresponding to five levers: point out the threat, mirror identity, exclude some people, depict transformation, and give the first step.

Take these five levers and match them against his own headlines—they fit almost perfectly. "You have roughly 36 months left" points to the threat; "if you have multiple interests" mirrors identity; "why most people can't do it" excludes others; "fix your entire life" depicts transformation; "in one day" is the first step.

Seven weeks later, he published another piece: "Give Me 20 Minutes and I'll Make You Impossible to Manipulate."

In Han Feizi, the man from Chu praised his spear and then praised his shield. A bystander asked just one question: "What if I use your spear to pierce your shield?"

The man could not answer.

His most-liked piece on Substack is called "How to Express Yourself Intelligently." He says that as a child he was always drawn to people who "sounded smart," even though "most of the time I couldn't understand what they were saying"; and that most of his success over the years comes down to taking valuable ideas and saying them in a way that makes people want to listen.

What he sells was never incomprehensible depth—it's the feeling of depth that you can understand.

Producing the feeling of depth relies on an assembly line.

In October 2025, he broke down his workflow on an entrepreneurship podcast. For topics, he only picks validated ones—either his own best-performing tweets or the highest-viewed videos in the same niche; a prompt called the "Viral Deconstructor" feeds three viral pieces into the model, extracts the structure, hook, and psychological triggers, and spits out a fill-in-the-blank template; another prompt interviews him like a journalist first, fills the material into the template, and produces three versions at once.

The products on the assembly line follow the market.

First, topics. Per ten thousand English words, "AI" rose from fewer than 1 time in 2023 to 35 times in 2026; "focus" dropped from 20 times in 2022 to 7—the person who wrote "The Art of Focus" talks about focus less and less. "One-person company" also fell to one or two mentions—by the time the Chinese internet started calling him the "godfather of one-person companies," he himself had stopped using the term.

Then, headlines. The blog URL is set at publication, and changing the headline doesn't affect the URL, so the original headline is preserved in the URL: "AI Will Never Replace True Creators" has a URL that says "most creators will fail"; "The Two-Hour Morning Routine That Changed My Life" has a URL that says "the million-dollar morning routine."

Then, opinions. More precisely, different packaging for the same opinion.

There's an old rule in self-media called "niche down," which is equivalent to the Chinese concept of "going vertical"—pick a narrow field and a fixed audience, and talk about only one thing. What Dan Koe has repeatedly said for five years is exactly the opposite: don't pick a niche—you yourself are the niche. He's been saying this from 2022 to 2026, under at least six different headlines.

"You Are The Niche" roadmap | Image source: X

Only the hook has never changed.

"99%" appears 91 times in his articles, with at least 11 headlines carrying it or "top 1%"—more efficient than 99% of people, ahead of 99% of people, better at using AI than 99% of people.

If every reader is ahead of 99% of people, where did the 99% go?

Probably all subscribed to his newsletter too.

Timeframes are also hooks. How long does it take to change your life? In his headlines he's offered one year, six months, ninety days, thirty days, two weeks, seven days, and finally shortened it to one day.

Another kind of hook is declaring something dead. Personal branding, the internet, deep creation, the 9-to-5, information products, influencers—all have died once in his headlines. In the October 2026 piece "Influencers Are Dead," the first half declares influencers dead, and the second half recommends his own software Eden and a 30-day creator course.

NPC

Behind the rhetoric is a complete worldview.

In August 2025, he released HUMAN 3.0, with the subtitle "A Map to Reaching the Top 1%." Life is divided into four quadrants—mind, body, spirit, and career—each with three levels. In the mind quadrant, these three levels have more colloquial names: NPC, Player, Creator.

NPC is his favorite word. In "You Were Not Born an NPC," the first story he tells is precisely about the "lag" in the eyes of those friends at church.

Three levels, one path upward, and a summit only a few can reach. In Latter-day Saint doctrine, heaven is also divided into three degrees: the celestial, terrestrial, and telestial. I'm not sure whether this is an intentional correspondence.

Weber's Calvinist believers, unable to know for certain whether they were chosen by God, had no choice but to work desperately, treating success as a sign of grace. HUMAN 3.0 readers carry the same anxiety, unable to determine whether they are among the 1%, so they can only keep reading, keep learning, keep subscribing.

Every order placed is a sign of grace.

The term NPC has another clever layer—it turns everyone around you into scenery. Parents, colleagues, friends who advise you not to quit your job—all become nameless extras on your main quest. And on the data dashboard in the background, that newly awakened "player" is nothing more than a conversion rate on a spreadsheet.

In April 2026, he coined another term, "Identity-Lifestyle Fit," saying it's the same thing as PMF in startups—except the product is you, and the market is your lifestyle.

When a person becomes a product, the life they're living naturally becomes a prison to escape.

Content that teaches people to escape the algorithm happens to be exactly what the algorithm loves to push.

In September, he wrote "You need to be delusional if you want to succeed"—if you want to succeed, you need a bit of delusion. The phrase "Just have faith," which he didn't believe years ago, came out of his own mouth over a decade later, dressed in new clothes.

The slogan he sells to readers is "be yourself," but the method he teaches is deconstructing why others go viral, then having AI copy it. In February 2025, he also wrote a piece titled "The Internet Is Dead, and We Killed It."

The internet, presumably, died just like that.

Tithing

The Latter-day Saints church requires believers to pay one-tenth of their income, called tithing. The creator economy's tithing is the monthly subscription.

Free tweets, videos, and articles sit at the top of the funnel; layer by layer downward, there's the $27-per-month community, the $150 writing course, and high-ticket programs costing thousands of dollars.

In July 2023, a creator named Josh Walker found 20 peers familiar with Dan Koe and asked them to explain what he actually makes money from. One person said, "He's selling dreams at scale." Another said that for many people, scrolling through Dan Koe's posts is a kind of "sophisticated procrastination"—you feel fired up while reading, and nothing changes after you finish. Did you learn anything? Sure you did.

In June 2024, he wrote "The Three Stages of Monetization (Why Most Creators Are Actually Poor)," drawing a funnel: 100% of people start, 1% stick with it, and of that 1%, only 1% can truly succeed. Why are the rest poor? His diagnosis is skill issue—their skills just aren't good enough.

In the same article, he also gave a concrete goal: to replace a job paying $56,000 a year, you'd need to earn about $4,700 a month; at $150 per product, that's 31 units sold per month, roughly one order a day; at a 2.5% landing page conversion rate, you'd need 1,240 visitors per month.

But where do those 1,240 visitors come from? At the same time, how many other people are holding the same template, competing for the same pool of visitors? The article says not a word about it.

A 2023 Morning Consult survey showed that 57% of American Gen Z want to be influencers, and 30% of them are willing to pay out of their own pockets for it. In a market where 30% of producers are willing to buy their own tickets to get in, what the most reliable business is goes without saying.

In the new article on November 3, he casually mentioned that another influencer who teaches people how to do business, Alex Hormozi, spends over $1 million a month paying creators to promote his paid community platform Skool.

The people selling shovels are running ads for the people selling shovels.

Speaking of selling shovels, in the 1848 California Gold Rush, the most widely told story is that of Samuel Brannan. It's said he first bought up all the gold pans around San Francisco, then held up a bottle of gold dust on the street and shouted that gold had been found; he bought gold pans for 20 cents and sold them for $15, making $36,000 in nine weeks and becoming California's first millionaire.

Coincidentally, Brannan was also a Latter-day Saint; two years before that story, it was he who chartered a ship called the "Brooklyn," carrying a boatload of believers from New York around Cape Horn to San Francisco, then still called Yerba Buena.

But the second half of the story is that in 1889, Brannan died near San Diego, almost penniless, unable even to scrape together the money for a funeral; his body lay in a morgue storage room for over a year, unclaimed.

Shovels have cycles too.

$3 million

He also tried another path.

In October 2023, he announced he was pouring every penny into his new company Kortex, a "revolutionary" writing software, saying "say goodbye to second brains like Notion and Obsidian." In February 2024, he specifically wrote that Kortex's team was "all contractors and creators, we have no employees"; in April, he published another piece titled "My startup made $759,900 in 6 months (without even officially launching)."

The ending was written by co-founder Matthew Ao.

According to his January 2026 retrospective, the project launched in July 2023, peaked at around 12 team members, and raised no funding; MRR once reached $60,000, but growth stalled and churn was high. Over two years, roughly $3 million was burned.

The first reason Ao listed was that users had insufficient reason to leave Notion and Obsidian; second, before even having users, they built their own billing, deployment, and authentication — the identity authentication system alone consumed hundreds of thousands of dollars in engineering time.

In November 2025, Dan Koe posted a video titled "Kortex: The $3 Million Mistake." The product was scrapped and rebuilt, renamed Eden. Over Black Friday weekend, Eden generated $250,000 in revenue. Ao added in his retrospective that this relied on Dan's fans and did not mean PMF had been found.

Eden Black Friday promotional video cover | Image source: X

The trouble wasn't over. Eden charged a flat monthly fee on the front end while paying per API call on the back end; once traffic picked up, costs once hit $1,000 per 30 minutes. At one point the company only had enough money to last two weeks, and the team was cut by more than half.

This is the difference between two kinds of businesses.

Writing an article for 10,000 people versus 100 million people costs almost the same; building an AI software means every additional user adds another computing bill. The content business has near-zero marginal cost and a near-zero moat; the software business has a moat, and also costs.

A person who evangelizes the one-person company, once he does something with a real barrier to entry, immediately needs a dozen people and millions of dollars, and then fails on product, organization, and engineering just like thousands of ordinary startups.

These things were never covered in his course.

Now, he has written "The Most Profitable AI Business of 2027," and the answer is doing content outsourcing for others, at $2,500 to $5,000 per month.

This is exactly the price he charged for a single funnel gig around 2019, before he quit. In 2024, he even called this kind of service business a "second nine-to-five."

Seven years, and he's come full circle. Except this time, the starting point has been packaged as the finish line.

Doomsday

Line up his headlines from the past two years.

Late 2024: AGI will make you irrelevant. May 2025: AI is coming for your job; July: you have about 36 months left; December 31: you have about 24 months to learn these skills. January 2026: don't waste the next two to three years—this is your last advantage.

The countdown keeps getting shorter.

Why does this particular play sell best in these two years? Because this time, the doomsday isn't entirely unfounded.

On April 30, 2026, writer Jasmine Sun published an op-ed in The New York Times, "Silicon Valley Is Preparing for a Permanent Underclass." She wrote that young people in their twenties in Silicon Valley joke half-seriously that they must make their fortune before a certain window closes, or else once AI takes over labor, class mobility will freeze.

The data confirms this anxiety. A Stanford paper, "Canaries in the Coal Mine," found that among occupations most affected by AI, employment for young people aged 22 to 25 declined by 13% relative to others.

We are actually no strangers to such moments. From Chen Anzhi and "Rich Dad Poor Dad," to "financial freedom" columns and "personal IP" bootcamps, to Li Yizhou's ¥199 AI course in 2023—according to Feigua Data, it sold about 250,000 sets in a year, with sales of about ¥50 million, and was removed from all platforms in February 2024.

Discover, deify, copy, sell courses, fade, move to the next. Naval went through it, Tim Ferriss went through it, and this round, it's Dan Koe's turn.

The leeks never run out, because every batch thinks it's the sickle.

Doomsday has always been the best salesman.

The Iron House

Sociologist C. Wright Mills gave an example: in a city of 100,000 people, if only one person is unemployed, that is his personal trouble; in a country with a labor force of 50 million, if 15 million people are unemployed, that is a public issue, and you cannot find the answer in the character of any single individual.

Dan Koe's articles do exactly the reverse operation.

Public issues, in his writing, become your identity hasn't been upgraded, your anti-vision isn't painful enough, you haven't finished answering those fifteen questions in the morning. In September 2025, he wrote "What Is Actually Wrong With People Today?", attributing social fractures to people "retreating to a lower level of consciousness," with one subheading titled "How People With Extremely Low Intelligence Think."

Byung-Chul Han says in The Burnout Society that people today are no longer exploited by others but exploit themselves, and believe this is freedom. One-person company: the boss is you, the employee is you, the supervisor is you. The so-called one-person company, in many cases, simply compresses all the risks of a company into one person's body.

That is how he himself has lived.

Once, friends planned for months to go to Seattle together to celebrate his birthday. After a weekend of sleeping in and accomplishing nothing, he was "furious." After returning home he "disappeared," replying to no one's messages and saying no to all invitations. He said discipline makes him happy.

Xiang Biao calls this state "suspension": a person's mind hangs entirely on an imagined future, with neither investment in nor care for the days beneath their feet, and the "nearby" around them disappears along with it. The ideal Tuesday three years from now, the anti-vision five years from now, the 36-month window—life is lived as a countdown table, and the day before your eyes is merely the fare to reach that day.

In his articles, the "nearby" occasionally calls.

In August 2024, he wrote that every time his mother called, she would ask: "Did you do anything fun this weekend?" He almost always answered: "No, same as usual." His mother would say: "You should get out more, you're still young." At that time he thought perhaps something was wrong with himself.

In September 2025, he said that week he "walked a lot, did a lot of work, went to the gym many times," and his mother urged him to rest. He wrote in the article that balance is for mediocre people.

By the article that got 250 million views, his mother was still urging him to go out and have fun. He wrote that he held back and did not tell her: "If I'm not happy, why would I live like this?"

Even earlier, he had hesitated.

In November 2021, he wrote that when he went home for the holidays, his mind was filled with what to eat, how much he had spent, and when he could return to keep working—he could even imagine himself internally judging his family's "ordinary people" behavior. He said that when he went home later that day, he would consciously spend quality time with them.

That was the third article he wrote.

Over the following five years, he devoted most of his energy to shouting at others to wake up from the dream.

In 1922, Lu Xun wrote in the preface to Call to Arms about an iron house with no windows, utterly indestructible, in which many people lay fast asleep, soon to suffocate. You shout loudly and rouse a few of the more clear-headed ones—"Do you think you are doing those unfortunate few a favor by making them suffer the irremediable agony of death?"

In the end, Lu Xun still shouted.

The following year, he lectured at Beijing Women's Normal College on "What Happens After Nora Leaves Home," saying that life's greatest pain is waking from a dream with no road to take. The dreamer is happy; if no viable path can be seen, the most important thing is not to wake him. After Nora leaves, she either falls or returns—unless she has money in her pocket.

"Freedom is not something money can buy, but it can be sold for money."

A hundred years later, the iron house has a new name: the Matrix.

Those who wake others no longer hesitate about whether to shout, because shouting itself has become a business. They tell every awakened person that the window exists, right here—for a monthly subscription of a few dozen dollars, or you can attend a $49 workshop.

Paint a moon on the lonely night sky, paint a large window on the iron house.

Five years ago, in his first article, he wrote that merely reading these things cannot change your life.

At the very bottom of the November 3 article "The Most Profitable AI Business of 2027," there was, as usual, the line Substack attaches to every article, inviting you to keep reading:

Ready for more?

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