12.10 — Infopreneurs, Tugan Bara, AI#

The ecosystem opposite to Ocarina. Not another testing framework: another cultural model. We have to name what the Holy Book fights to understand why it fights. And why AI is killing this model.

1. What is “infopreneurship”#

Definition#

Infopreneur = entrepreneur whose product is sold information: online courses, coaching programs, e-books, masterminds, “premium newsletter” subscriptions. The product isn’t physical.

Typical business model:

1. Free: YouTube, podcast, call-to-action newsletter
   ↓ (authority building, lead capture)
2. Front-end product: €27 e-book / €97 mini-course
   ↓ (trust building, upsell)
3. Back-end product: flagship course at €997 / €2497 / €4997
   ↓ (client qualification)
4. Continuum / coaching: mastermind €12,000/year, 1:1 support at €5,000/day

The commercial mechanism is called a funnel, propped up by copywriting — the art of writing persuasive sales texts.

American origin#

Tradition born in the United States in the 1970s-1980s with:

• Dan Kennedy — No B.S. series. Classic direct response marketing.
• Jay Abraham — Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got.
• Frank Kern, Russell Brunson (ClickFunnels), Eben Pagan — the 2000s digital marketing generation.

Scheme: problem → agitation → solution → CTA + urgency + scarcity.
Stacked bonuses. Fake urgency. Decreasing price (value stacking). 30-day “satisfied or full refund” guarantee.

Arrival in France#

The model came to France via a handful of actors who Frenchified American copywriting.
Among them: Tugan Bara.

2. Tugan Bara / Arnaud Labossière#

Identity#

Sources: Meilleurs Outils Marketing — Tugan Bara, Top Avis Formations — Tugan Bara, Mike Troy — Marketing Bourrin 2026, Usine Digitale — Arnaud Labossière

Post-2023 evolution#

The evolution itself is instructive: he left his identity “Emperor of spam” / “The worst thing the internet ever spawned” / “Before you hate me, hate the world that made me possible” / “Gitantrepreneur” the moment AI started making his core trade obsolete (copywriting).

In the meantime, he also drifted a bit into crypto bullshit that didn’t give much except wasted time and energy.
He saw the writing on the wall, converted his audience into an AI platform, sold. Elegant exit.

In the end, Tugan refocused on one element of his identity that hasn’t changed since what he announced during Covid: “I’m the expert that experts consult”.

Why cite him#

Tugan Bara is the French archetype of the infopreneur model, and above all the first to be unfiltered with firm intent to break the market:

• Very long, very aggressive sales pages.
• Promise of revenue dependent on marketing effort, not on trade.
• Fake urgency.
• Stacked bonuses.
• Testimonials systematically highlighted.
• “Anti-establishment” posture.
• Audience composed mostly of people who want to quit their job to become online entrepreneurs.
• Factual about what’s grey hat, no fear in explaining what really happens in his industry.

Ocarina’s Holy Book doesn’t cite Tugan Bara by name.
But it describes exactly his archetype:

Today people launch projects like you walk down the street to buy a pack of cigarettes.
They try, because it’s “trending”.
Then they all copy each other, sign up to each other’s subscriptions to mutually inflate their numbers and deflate their Stripe dispute rates.
They think they’re clever: reality is every VC, every LP, everyone is well aware, and each plays their role in a con.

That’s precisely the portrait of the French infopreneur bubble 2016-2023.
With the amusing exception that Tugan Bara denounces it word-for-word too — but profoundly understands the “rules of the game” and applies them, rather than being a mental degenerate “chick in g-string, lambo, champagne, champagne on the lambo, chick in g-string on the lambo”.

3. Why this ecosystem is unhealthy#

1. Sells dreams. The promise isn’t “you’ll learn X”, it’s “you’ll earn €Y/month”. Yet Y depends on thousands of variables the course doesn’t control.

2. Survives by recruitment, not by value. Once a program is bought, the real product is the next one. And the next. And the next.

3. Recruits vulnerable audiences. Typical buyers: burned-out salaried workers, young parents in transition, expats losing their bearings. They need to believe, so they believe.

4. Standardizes a model that only works for a few. Success stories exist, but they’re survivorship bias. Most buyers never make more than €15 of “accidental” revenue.

5. Creates fake community. Masterminds, private exchange platforms, bootcamps look like community but are an extension of the product. Leaving the program = losing the “community”. Some even formalize cultic drifts and call it an “infopreneur community”.

6. Cannibalizes real skills. At least Tugan’s courses had real value, but that’s frankly not the case for most. For all that time wasted on “garbage courses”, you get a young person who’s just been dumbed down further.

7. Spreads a counter-ethic of sell at all costs. Sales ethics (the real kind) are explicitly presented as a handicap in underground programs. People learn to “hack” the prospect’s psychology. For every one person who really understands the strings, a thousand will simply commit offenses.

A word from the Holy Book#

Lesson for these amateurs: any “cutting-edge” project, whatever it is, starts as a pamphlet, is identity-driven, and goes through a real anti-marketing stage. But because you’re afraid of embarrassing your mom, you never do it.

Reading: a real (cutting-edge) project starts with a refusal, not a sales funnel.
Surprisingly, Tugan Bara and the author would probably align on this particular question. First because Tugan himself acknowledged that funnels were starting to lose power due to regulation plus market saturation. But mostly because these words could very well have been his.

More precisely:

But because you’re afraid of embarrassing your mom, you never do it.

is a direct borrowing from Tugan Bara’s discourse.

Likewise:

Cluely’s CEO, Roy Lee, admits publicly lying about his startup’s revenue last year. Krishman Rohit then reminds us that from the very start, their value proposition was fraud.

is a wink to a recent Tugan video: IRAN + INVEST + DUBAI + MISSILES = $$$ | ARNAUD LABOSSIERE

Also:

Then they all copy each other, sign up to each other’s subscriptions to mutually inflate their numbers and deflate their Stripe dispute rates.

Another wink to the same video

And finally:

It’s time to kick the ass of all your Juicero presses.

Yet another wink to the same video

Honestly, even the “Yet another one” of the first article is a wink to Tugan.

“Back to fundamentals”
“Harmonizing selfishness”
“Just wanting to impress peers”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Prestige / Profit”
“Anti-everything”
“The best ideas arrive at the cemetery just as much as the wackiest”

More ironic still, Tugan made his name during the Covid crisis with one of his sites, marketingunderground.biz.
The list of “coincidences” is endless.

All that’s missing is:

“Tu le vends à qui ton putain de yaourt ?” (— Who the fuck are you selling your yogurt to?)

Case closed.

4. Why AI kills this model#

The infopreneur offer’s core = copywriting and synthesizing recycled resources#

The product sold isn’t knowledge — knowledge is often available for free (on YouTube, or in €20 books).

The product is:

• Packaging (creating an offer).
• Orchestration (funnel that leads from free to paid, endless upsells).
• Storytelling (the authority built via free content, notably via clipping: infopreneurs are all “friends” and participate in many “interviews” then rebroadcast everywhere by affiliates; it’s often a decoy to amass distribution power. Precisely what Tugan Bara denounced about Cluely and others).

AI ejects precisely these skills#

• The cost of a funnel collapses
• The volume of funnels flooding the market explodes
• The signal (quality emerging from noise) drops
• Buyers become immune to generic, hollow copywriting without real identity ("yet another funnel")

The AI Slop Effect on infopreneurship#

As all actors use the same AI tools to generate the same trashy texts, markets desensitize. That’s the documented AI slop effect. The press, marketing emails, LinkedIn ads: everything becomes conformist, codified, in a sense. What remains is what’s truly exceptional, and it’s neither on LinkedIn nor in funnels powered by ad networks overrun with professional bullshitters.

Tugan Bara understands before the others#

His 2023-2024 trajectory:

1. Co-founds Tugan.ai — he becomes the tool that automates his core trade.
2. Sells Tugan.ai in 2024 — he exits in time.
3. Repositions as Arnaud Labossière, further from the initial infopreneur model, while staying true to himself.

This confirms the Holy Book’s diagnosis: the intelligent actors in this ecosystem leave it.

5. Coherence with Ocarina’s manifesto#

Today the challenge of being the biggest liar becomes less and less profitable.
And good riddance.

Holy Book key line. “The biggest liar” = the one with the most persuasive sales text, the most optimized funnel, the most bling-bling posture.

Just like AI, which is calmly making this “1%"’s capacity for harm obsolete.

Exactly parallel line. The “1%” = the slipologues + the cheap infopreneurs + the sellers of ostentatious complexity. AI destroys them.

Wink in the ecosystem READMEs#

The READMEs of the repos carry a disclaimer like:

This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Vercel. Vercel is a trademark of Vercel Inc.

Pushed to open parody:

This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Banania. Banania is a trademark of Nutrimaine SAS.

It’s a direct reference to Tugan Bara. Sales pages run through ad networks (Facebook Ads, Google Ads) were systematically annotated with this footer — the classic “Facebook is a trademark of Meta Platforms Inc. This page is not affiliated with…" — to pass network moderation. Ocarina picks up the code, twists it toward the absurd (Banania), and signs it.

6. Ocarina’s positioning#

7. Closing word#

Trajectories converge — contrary to many received ideas, AI and the “modern world” bring substantial cleanup to the IT sector.

Frankly, good riddance: these animals, these filthy little rats, won’t be missed.
OUT! ✈️

“The dogs bark, the caravan moves on.”

Ocarina is one instrument of this relay — not the only one, not the most visible. But a coherent, auditable instrument, already ready before the market demands what it offers. The market may be desperately demanding it, without even knowing it exists.

And we don’t care, we feel no “moral obligation to sell it”, sorry Zig Ziglar.
What irony!

That said, we remain interested in passing on a deeply meaningful message to future generations without having to bill them for it at "only €97 and only 5 spots available".

May we give them the courage they need in this world where they're deeply misunderstood and lost: you are probably not "crazy", but rather on the right side of History without knowing it.

The world changes, unfortunately not at the same pace as the institutions.

So don't be rookies — cultivate yourselves, far beyond what's taught as "basics" in school curricula.
Personal work, introspection, and courage pay off.

The pay-in is terribly long and tortuous; the pay-off gives the satisfaction of a life that will have been worth living.

Learn to know yourselves: become your own best friend.
A little pride!
A little honor!

It's not that we recommend sabotaging your schooling like we did — we have our eye on you: don't be as dumb as your elders. Our mistake and our greatest strength at once was probably to be that stubborn and brutal. But we did it because we needed to.

Dropping out of school is anything but classy, but on the other hand I only learned far too late, at 28, that I might actually have had my place as a student at ENS's MPRI — so who am I to judge?

At least I will have ended up with the inner peace of knowing it exists,
even if I identified it too late.

Our web pages will stay ugly, but the substance will always be what you won't find anywhere else.

Hack the planet,
Code is Law.
dade — Keep Moving Forward, Soundcloud