Behind every convincing monster, a crew:

I went looking into peptide therapy last week. I've had good experience with it, but I've moved to a new town.

After running my Yelp/Google "these are not near me nor anywhere near in the business I've just queried" prefilter — probably another note to make sometime — I found about a dozen clinics.

They all looked professional. Polished sites, credentialed-looking team pages, testimonials, the works.

Something was off, and it took me a while to name it.

First, there were too many. Using needles to inject anything into a human is not a casual storefront operation.

Second, the sameness. What I was looking at was a wave of businesses that didn't exist a year ago — maybe not a month ago — all carrying the particular sheen of having been built fast, by the same tools, from the same templates. The cost of putting up a credible-looking business front used to be real. Months of design work, copy, accumulated history. That cost was a filter. Most operators who shouldn't have been in a market couldn't clear it.

The filter is gone. An afternoon and a few dollars now produces what used to take a year. The facade is now cheaper than the substance.

The peptide market is an interesting example because the underlying medicine sits in a regulatory gray zone that makes legitimate operations and facades hard to tell apart on the surface. But it's not the only one. Anywhere substance is hard to verify — alternative health, supplements, coaching, consulting — the same wave is rolling through.

If the Substack and X posts on "How to build a billion-dollar business in three microseconds or less" are any indication, we're at an interesting intersection: an explosion of outright scamming alongside a tsunami of half-baked, well-intentioned "businesses." Both eating away at the credibility system that used to do the sorting for us.

I'm not sure yet what the full piece on this looks like. But the observation seemed worth getting down while it was fresh.

If you've run into the same thing — a market that suddenly seems crowded with operations that all look kind of right and all feel slightly wrong — I'd be interested to hear which one.