I liked Ferris explaining that you can validate a market exists by serving ads pretending you already have a product. What a scumbag. Isn't the rest of the book just drop shipping and selling supplements with high margins? I recall snippets of a manual for unethical but mostly legal small business between stories of people making money on such practices.

I like his description of how you could just call up an expert on the phone and often get a quick answer to any question they can answer quickly. I'd learned that one myself.

Like it or not a lot of successful businesses have some bodies buried somewhere, particularly those that have been successful in two-sided markets such as online communities. There have been legendary successes in marketing enterprise software that didn't quite exist but I can say it didn't work when I tried it.