Back at Harrah's, sometime after midnight, I sat in my room counting business cards like a gambler counting chips. Wins and losses. Possibilities and dead ends.
The account recovery service: maybe legitimate, maybe a lawsuit waiting to happen.
The Sweeps partnership: still viable, still promising, still requiring me to build bridges between industries that preferred to pretend each other didn't exist.
The proxies and SMS verification: selling steadily, because the phone farms never sleep and the automation never stops.
I'd come to Vegas for Affiliate Summit with a simple goal: make connections, explore opportunities, plant seeds for future revenue. By those metrics, the day had been a success. But success in this business always felt like standing in the middle of a freeway at rush hour and somehow not getting hit. Exhilarating, yes. Sustainable? That was a different question.
The room needed cleaning. I'd have to deal with that in the morning. Extra towels, fresh sheets, the mundane logistics of keeping body and soul together while my mind raced through business models and partnership structures.
Outside my window, Las Vegas continued its eternal performance. Lights that never dim, action that never stops, the machinery of American appetite grinding away twenty-four hours a day.
I have two more weeks of this. Affiliate Summit bleeding into Creator Economy Live bleeding into AVN. A triple-header of hustles, each one a different flavor of the same fundamental transaction: attention into money, traffic into revenue, desire into profit.
Not many people understood this business. Not the specific technology, most died before mobile proxies and SMS verification became million-dollar industries, but the spirit of it. The energy of people gathering to compare notes on extraction, to share techniques for separating simps from money, to celebrate the ancient American art of the hustle.
We were all traffic dealers now. Some of us just had better euphemisms.
I fell asleep with my phone in my hand, emails still coming in, opportunities still presenting themselves, the conference continuing in digital space even as the physical venue shut down for the night.
Tomorrow there would be more sessions, more networking, more pitches. The breakout stages and the main stages, the expo floor and the hotel bars, the endless circulation of people selling attention to people selling access to people selling dreams.
But tonight, there was just the room, the silence, and the strange peace that comes from knowing I survived another day in the traffic wars.