Why I Joined WhoScale.io
A thesis on attention, meaning, and the coming exodus from bullshit jobs into the new new rich.
I have spent the last 10 years inside an industry that most serious people refuse to take seriously: infoproducts. Courses, coaching, communities, paid newsletters, masterminds, cohorts, private Discords, retreats. 10 years, a few millions generated through my own offers, several thousand entrepreneurs trained, and one AI copywriting tool sold along the way (Tugan.ai, 60,000 users, exited in 2024). I have watched this market be dismissed as a circus of fake gurus and lottery winners for the entire duration of my career. I now believe the people doing the dismissing are about to be very surprised.
I have joined WhoScale because I think the next 10 years are going to look nothing like the last 10, and because I think the infoproduct economy is going to absorb a population it was never built to serve: the educated, the credentialed, the previously comfortable. The “losers” of the next wave will not be Jean-Kevin who dropped out of high school. They will be the analyst, the consultant, the middle manager, the junior lawyer, the copywriter, the designer, the engineer whose work was the first thing to get folded into a model context window. And when those people come looking for a way out, they are going to need infrastructure. WhoScale is one of those pieces of infrastructure.
This essay is my attempt to explain, in long form and without commercial euphemism, why I bet on this company and what I think it is actually for.
The macro: 2 collisions
In a previous essay I argued that the last 40 years of “tech” have functioned, for the bottom 90% of the population, as an architecture of dispossession. Automation took the jobs, globalization shipped them away, the platform economy atomized what was left, and finance ate the residual. Concentration of wealth at the top, stagnation in the middle, fragility at the bottom. That was the slow violence of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and it was inflicted overwhelmingly on people who did not have university degrees.
What is starting now is different. The next wave of dispossession is not coming for the bottom 90%. It is coming for the next 9.
The professional-managerial class, the urban graduate, the knowledge worker whose entire identity was built on the idea that their cognitive labor was non-fungible, is staring down a model that writes their memos, drafts their decks, summarizes their meetings, codes their CRUD apps, and answers their clients’ emails in 5 languages. That class will not die. But its rent is about to collapse. The work will still get done. The premium their employer was willing to pay for them to do it will not survive.
This is the first collision. Educated downward mobility, at scale, for the first time since the credentialing economy was invented.
The second collision is older and stranger. It is the collision between a hyper-productive, hyper-connected society and the lived experience of meaninglessness. Loneliness is at historical highs. So is anxiety. So is what David Graeber called bullshit jobs, the suspicion among workers that their own labor produces nothing of value and could be eliminated without consequence. The most striking cultural indicator right now is not anything in tech. It is the surge in religious conversion in the United States, particularly toward Catholicism, among young men and women who grew up in a culture that told them religion was over. People are not converting because they have been argued into it. They are converting because the secular career-and-consumption stack has stopped delivering what it promised: a sense that one’s life adds up to something.
These 2 collisions are about to meet. A large, suddenly-precarious, formally-educated population is being thrown into the same labor market at the same moment as a generalized hunger for meaning, identity, and belonging. That meeting point is the infoproduct economy.
What the infoproduct economy actually is
The standard misreading of this industry is that it sells information. It does not. Information has been free or near-free for a long time. Anyone who claims their €2,000 course teaches something that cannot be found in a library, a YouTube channel, or a $5 e-book is, in most cases, technically wrong.
What the industry actually sells is transformation. More precisely, it sells the social and psychological scaffolding required to act on information one already, on some level, possesses. It sells permission. It sells identity migration. The sociologist Robert Merton had a useful phrase for this: the gap between one’s membership group, the people one happens to be among, and one’s reference group, the people one wants to be among. Every successful infoproduct, from a €500 fitness course to a $50,000 mastermind, is a vehicle for crossing that gap. The customer is not paying for instruction. They are paying to be inducted.
This is also why the industry is impossible to disrupt with a chatbot. The naive take in 2023 and 2024 was that large language models would kill online education, because if a student can ask a model anything, why pay a course creator? The take is wrong for the same reason private tutors did not kill universities and universities did not kill churches. Humans do not move when they receive information. They move when they see someone who looks like them, who started where they started, having already moved. Roger Bannister did not break the four-minute mile because of new training methods; the methods existed. He broke it because nobody had yet proven it was breakable, and within 3 years more than a dozen runners had done the same thing. The barrier was never physiological. It was a barrier of belief, and belief is contagious only through embodied example.
A model can give you the steps. It cannot stand in front of you as proof. The economics of the infoproduct industry rest on that asymmetry, and that asymmetry is not going anywhere.
Who the customers are about to be
For most of its history, this industry has been built on what I will call, with affection and zero contempt, the autodidacts and the outsiders. The 45-year-old divorced therapist who is done with the system. The high-school dropout who has something to prove. The night-shift worker who has been reading Robert Kiyosaki under fluorescent lights. These were the original buyers and they remain a huge part of the market. They are not stupid. They are people who, for one reason or another, found themselves outside the official meritocratic conveyor belt, and who came to the internet looking for an alternative route.
What is changing is that the official conveyor belt is now ejecting passengers. The new buyers are people who did everything they were told to do. They went to the right school, took the right internships, got the right job, and now find that the slope of their career is bending in the wrong direction. They have savings. They have taste. They have networks. They have a high tolerance for buying their way out of problems. They are about to discover the same thing the autodidacts discovered 15 years ago, which is that the most leveraged thing you can do with the internet is package what you know, sell it directly, and own the audience.
I have spent 10 years watching the first wave. I want to be there when the second wave arrives, because the second wave is going to be 10x the size of the first, and the people who already understand the medium are going to be in a very strange position: that of suddenly being elders in an industry that the world is about to take seriously.
The new new rich
There is a sociological fact that almost nobody has named yet, and that I think is one of the most important phenomena of the past 10 years.
There is now a global, geographically distributed, ideologically coherent class of people earning between $70,000 and several hundred thousand dollars a month, mostly online, mostly through some combination of audience, software, leveraged offers, and capital deployment. I call them the new new rich, to distinguish them from the old rich (heirs, dynasties, landed capital) and from the merely new rich of the dot-com and finance era (executives, founders cashed out into an IPO).
The new new rich do not look like either. They are fractal: scattered across cities, often nomadic, often anonymous, organized in private communities rather than in institutions. They are also, despite the geographic dispersion, culturally homogeneous to a degree that surprises everyone who encounters them for the first time. They read the same books. They use the same software. They share a worldview that draws heavily on something like Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual and that treats individual leverage, jurisdictional optionality, and information arbitrage as primary goods.
What makes them economically interesting is not the absolute size of their wealth, which is small compared to traditional capital. It is their liquidity, their iteration speed, and the fact that techniques which appear in venture-backed startups 3 years from now have usually been running in e-commerce, crypto, and infoproducts for 5 to 7 years already. This is not folklore. Anybody who has spent serious time in those markets has watched it happen repeatedly: a “new” growth tactic in B2B SaaS turns out to be a 2019 dropshipping move with a fresh coat of paint.
The new new rich are not a curiosity. They are, in my view, a likely candidate for the dominant economic class of the next 20 years, precisely because they have optimized their entire stack for a world of distributed capital, geographic arbitrage, and direct relationships with consumers. Whether one finds this thrilling or troubling is a separate question. What is not in doubt is that they exist, that they are growing, and that the path from the internet proletariat into their ranks is going to be one of the most important career trajectories of the next 10 years.
WhoScale is, among other things, a tool for shortening that path.
What WhoScale actually does
E-commerce has had, for years, a category of tools that nobody in infoproducts had. Trendtrack, BrandSearch, and a handful of others let an operator look at the e-commerce market the way a fund analyst looks at public equities: which stores are scaling, what ads they are running, which creatives are working, which landing pages are converting, where the revenue is concentrated, where the breakouts are happening. An e-commerce operator without access to one of these tools is essentially flying blind. An e-commerce operator with one is doing competitive intelligence at industrial scale.
The infoproduct industry, which is now larger and growing faster than most observers realize, has had nothing equivalent. Every coach, every guru, every course on how to build a course tells you the same opening move: find a profitable niche and build something similar but better. Nobody tells you how to find the niche. The advice has been, essentially, vibes plus persistence.
WhoScale is the data layer that has been missing. It tracks who is spending on ads and how much, across creators, brands, and platforms. It surfaces which creatives are running, which funnels are converting, which offers are scaling, which niches are accelerating, who is breaking out and who is rolling off. It refreshes continuously. It allows an operator, for the first time, to look at the infoproduct market the way a fund manager looks at a sector.
I had been suggesting some version of this idea on ideas.xyz for a while before I encountered the team. When I met them, 2 things were obvious. The first was that they had already shipped a competitive MVP on minimal capital, which is the single hardest thing to do in this category and the single best predictor of whether a team can survive. The second was that they had real go-to-market intuition: traction came fast, MRR came fast, the affiliate engine was working, the iteration cycle on both product and marketing was tight. Most teams I encounter are good at one of those things and broken on the other. This one was good at both.
That was the moment. I do not have a more romantic version of it.
What I bring, and what I don’t
I want to be specific about my role, because I dislike vague advisor announcements as much as anyone.
I am here as a co-founder in spirit and in contribution: advising on direction, promoting the product to the audiences I have spent a decade building, and contributing to product inputs from the operator side. I am not running engineering, I am not running daily operations, I am not the face of the company. Adriano and the founding team are. My job is to bring 3 things they would otherwise have to build from scratch.
The first is 10 years of pattern recognition in this specific industry. I was one of the earliest people in France to sell e-books and online courses at scale. I left HEC 3 months in, in 2013, to do exactly that. I have built and broken offers in this market at almost every price point and almost every format. I know what scales, what plateaus, and what looks like it is scaling but is actually a survivorship illusion. WhoScale’s customers are people who are trying to build the kinds of businesses I have already built. That experience compounds when it is brought to a tool that is meant to serve them.
The second is distribution. I have audiences, partners, and relationships across the French-speaking and increasingly the English-speaking creator economy. I have a podcast (Mass Extract), an investment vehicle around distribution ownership (The Next Big Shit), and a tool in that same space (Reach.cat). The Dream 100 logic that Russell Brunson formalized for online education 10 years ago, in which you systematically build relationships with the 100 people who already command the audiences you want to reach, is something I have been practicing operationally for a long time. WhoScale is a product where that approach has unusually strong leverage, because the people who can credibly promote it are the same people whose own businesses are visible inside it.
The third is taste. There is a particular set of judgment calls in this category, about which features to ship, which segments to chase, which kinds of customers to politely decline, that will determine whether WhoScale becomes the dominant intelligence tool for this market or 1 of 3. I have opinions on those calls and I have been wrong enough times to have calibrated them.
Why I personally want this
I should say the honest thing, because it matters.
I find this fun. I find the people in this industry interesting. I find the speed at which they iterate, the directness of their relationship with their own economics, the absence of corporate theater, more interesting than almost anything happening in venture-backed software. I have spent 10 years in this world and I am not done with it. I want to keep working with the operators I respect, build the tools they need, take positions in the businesses they create, and stay close to a market that I think is about to become much larger and much more legitimate than it currently is.
There is also a thesis underneath the fun, which is the one I have been circling around for this entire essay. If I am right that we are entering a period in which a large, educated, suddenly-precarious population is going to look for ways to convert what they know into independent income, and if I am right that the existing infoproduct industry is the most developed infrastructure for doing that conversion, then helping that industry mature is one of the more useful things a person with my background can do. Not because every course is good. They are not. Not because every creator is worth following. They are not. But because the alternative, for most of the people I am talking about, is to spend the next 10 years waiting for an employer to figure out what to do with them. The infoproduct economy, for all its excesses, is an actual answer to actual downward mobility. It needs better tools. WhoScale is one of them.
The new new rich are not a closed caste. The path in is more learnable, more documented, and more accessible than at any previous moment in history. What it has been missing is the same thing every developed market eventually gets: a data layer that lets newcomers see what is actually working, instead of having to reconstruct it from scratch on their own.
That is the thing we are building. That is why I joined.
Arnaud Labossiere is an entrepreneur and investor. He writes about economics, distribution, and the markets nobody else takes seriously yet.