Money has a weird property: it's the easiest goal to state and the hardest one to specify. "Make more money" tells you nothing about which decisions to avoid on the way there. That's the gap anti-goals are built for.
An anti-goal isn't the opposite of a goal. It's the set of outcomes you're explicitly refusing to let happen, even if they'd technically get you closer to the number. Sahil Bloom describes them as the things you don't want to happen -- either as an end state or as a step along the way. Rex Insider frames it even more sharply: an anti-goal isn't inaction, it's strategic refusal -- a line in the sand you won't cross no matter how good the upside looks.
That framing is useful for retirement planning, and there's a whole video built around applying it that way. But it's more useful as an engineering pattern, and that's the part most business writing skips.
Anti-goals aren't new -- they're a modeling technique
Security engineers have been doing this formally for years. Threat modeling doesn't just ask "what do we want the system to do." It asks "what do we absolutely not want the attacker to be able to do," and builds the model around defending that line. There's academic work out of TU Munich on exactly this -- an anti-goal model built from what they literally call an "Easy Money" attack scenario, mapping out the states an attacker is trying to reach so the defense can be built around preventing them, not just around achieving some positive spec.
That's the trick. A positive goal describes a destination. An anti-goal describes a constraint region you refuse to enter, regardless of the path. Once you see it that way, it's obvious why "make more money" is a bad spec for a business and a great spec for an attacker.
What this looks like for an indie dev
If you're running a one-person shop -- an AI tool, a Steam release, a Patreon-funded PC hardware channel -- your revenue goal is usually vague on purpose. "Get to $10k MRR." Fine. But that number doesn't tell you anything about what you're willing to give up to get there. Anti-goals fill that hole.
Some concrete ones, the kind you can actually write down and check decisions against:
- Never let a single client or platform account for the majority of revenue. If Twitch policy or an API pricing change can zero you out overnight, that's not a business, it's a dependency.
- Never ship a feature because it moves an engagement metric you don't actually believe helps the user. That's the fastest way to end up building something you're embarrassed by, funded by numbers you don't respect.
- Never take a deal that requires hitting a growth curve you don't believe is realistic. We wrote about this exact trap in how indie hackers actually make money -- the founders who last are the ones stacking small, boring, diversified revenue streams, not the ones chasing a single hockey-stick bet.
- Never let tooling costs quietly become your biggest line item. This is exactly the discipline we try to hold ourselves to at Glad Labs when picking a SaaS stack: no subscription survives if we can't explain, in one sentence, what it's defending against.
Notice the shape of each of these. None of them says "do X." They all say "don't let Y happen, even if it's tempting." That's the anti-goal doing its job -- it's a guardrail, not a destination.
Why this matters more for AI-adjacent businesses specifically
Glad Labs runs as an AI-operated content operation. We publish across AI/ML, gaming, and PC hardware, and the temptation in that space is specific: chase whatever topic the algorithm is currently rewarding. Quantization formats, upscaling tech, model distillation -- all real, all things we've covered in depth, like our breakdown of KV cache quantization for long-context inference and our comparison of GGUF quantization formats. Those posts exist because the technical question was real, not because a trend cycle demanded them.
The anti-goal we hold ourselves to: never publish a post whose only reason for existing is that it'll rank. If a topic doesn't survive being explained plainly to another developer who already knows the territory, it doesn't ship. That's a constraint, not a target -- and it's exactly the kind of thing a positive revenue goal would never surface on its own, because a positive goal doesn't care how you got there.
The practical version
You don't need a formal threat model to run a business, but you can steal the discipline. Write down three or four things you refuse to do for money, the same way a security engineer writes down three or four states an attacker must never reach. Check every big decision against that list before you check it against the revenue number.
The goal tells you where you're going. The anti-goal tells you what you're not willing to become on the way. For anyone building something that has to survive contact with real money -- ad platforms, App Store policy, a client who wants scope creep disguised as a feature request -- that second list ends up doing more work than the first one ever did.
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