Tomorrow, The Long Game goes live. Before it does, I want to tell you why I'm doing this — and what you've actually signed up for. Because apparently clicking "subscribe" now means you deserve a full explanation.
The honest version of the story
I spent 30 years in global tech. Large US companies. Australian startups. I lived in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and worked in more than 70 countries.
I co-own a medical centre in regional Western Australia.
By every conventional measure, it worked.
Good income. Solid career. A respectable CV. A house. A business. Plenty of responsibilities. An impressive collection of passwords I've forgotten. Basically, all the things you're told to want when you're starting out.
But here's what nobody tells you:
Conventional success and actual freedom are not the same thing.
I had income, but not location independence. I had a title, but not the ability to choose where I lived. I had security, although much of it seemed to involve payroll, tax deadlines and emails beginning with "Just following up…"
What I actually wanted was the freedom to relocate at will, work from anywhere and build something that could generate income whether I was sitting at my desk, walking on a beach or pretending not to check Stripe every six minutes.
So, at 55, I decided to build it.
A perfectly normal age to start again from zero. Not quietly. Not secretly. Not in a notebook that would eventually disappear into a drawer beside several unused gym memberships.
I'm doing it publicly because I think the most useful thing I can offer is the real experiment — not a polished highlight reel created after everything has worked.
What The Long Game actually is
It's an experiment with a specific goal:
Build location-independent income of USD $20,000 per month using AI-powered internet businesses within 24 months. Starting from zero. Online revenue on day one: $0.
So technically, there's already enormous room for growth.
Every decision, strategy, mistake and monthly revenue number will be published here. Every Sunday.
There are four things I believe this experiment runs on:
Radical Transparency
Every number gets published. If the month was good, you'll know. If it was bad, you'll also know — probably before my accountant does.
If something fails, I'll explain what happened, why I think it happened and what I'm changing.
No carefully curated success stories. No screenshots of revenue with the expenses mysteriously cropped out.AI as the unfair advantage
I have 30 years of experience and access to the most capable AI tools ever created. That combination should change the economics of building an online business. That's the hypothesis.
This newsletter is the test. There is also a reasonable chance the AI spends part of the next two years confidently giving me instructions for buttons that don't exist. We'll document that too.Long-term compounding
We're not chasing viral moments, overnight success or videos of me pointing at floating text.
We're building assets: content, audience, systems, products and trust. Things that compound over time.
The pawn crosses the board slowly. Occasionally it gets knocked over, blamed on the algorithm and placed back where everyone thinks it started. That's the whole point.Documenting the failures as carefully as the wins
The failures are where the useful information lives. Every wrong turn I take is one you may not have to.
Think of me as a reasonably experienced, publicly documented crash-test dummy for AI-powered internet businesses.
What's coming
Tomorrow, longgameco.com launches properly, with the full website, the About page and the first real look at what we're building. From Sunday, 3 August, the weekly build reports begin. Every Sunday, I'll publish:
What I built
What broke
What the revenue was
What I learned
What I'm building next
What looked easy on YouTube but took three days in real life
Over the next 30 days, you'll see:
The first AI-powered business launched publicly
The first attempt to generate revenue
The actual tools and workflows I'm using
My honest view of which tools are useful and which are expensive enthusiasm generators
Month 1 numbers, including every dollar in and every dollar out
One thing before you go
If you know someone who followed the conventional path and quietly wonders whether a different kind of freedom is possible, please forward them this email.
They don't have to be 55. They don't have to work in tech. They don't even have to want to move to Thailand, although the weather certainly helps the sales pitch.
They just have to prefer watching a real experiment unfold over reading another success story written by someone who has conveniently forgotten the difficult parts.
The Long Game launches tomorrow.
See you Sunday.
— Mark
P.S. Nothing in this newsletter is financial advice. It's one person's experiment, documented honestly. Draw your own conclusions. Ideally not in crayon.