Teenagers were selling single pieces of code to strangers on Discord for $300,000.
Today, VCs are asking founders if they built on Sneaker Twitter as a qualifying question, while hypergrowth startups like Slash, Whop, Browserbase, and others are actively hiring out of it.
Most people have never heard of it.
Not companies, not products. One anti-bot bypass, bought because it let a piece of software win a single sneaker drop, and one good drop was all it took to double that software’s price on the secondary market.
VICE covered a teenager making $600,000 a year off it.Business Insider ran a whole guide on how the tooling worked. Nobody outside of it understood what they were actually looking at.
I ran 6+ businesses inside it before I turned 21. It had maybe a thousand serious participants worldwide and operated at a level of intensity that only working at a hypergrowth startup has come close to matching.
That market was Sneaker Twitter. Not sneakerheads. Sneaker Twitter.
Under a thousand people were building the infrastructure behind it. Bots, cook groups, browser extensions, proxy companies, data companies, monitor companies. Every single one of those businesses existed to do one thing, which was to save you milliseconds at checkout. That's the whole industry.
That's also why the hiring and the VC interest make sense. If you survived this market as a teenager, you've already been through something most people never experience in an entire career.
The Drops
Retailers release limited shoes at a specified time. Hundreds of thousands of people show up for a few hundred pairs, and that's the same setup every single weekend.
So Sneaker Twitter built bots to buy hundreds of pairs the second they went live. Retailers responded with anti-bot protection, bot developers responded by breaking it, and that cycle ran for years without ever really stopping.
The part that surprises people is that the bots themselves became the scarce asset. If everyone has a bot then nobody has an edge, so developers deliberately restricted supply. They'd release 100 copies at a time with 10,000+ people going for them, which means the bots got botted just like the shoes did.
Cybersole and Wrath were going for thousands over retail, sometimes $5,000 to $10,000, for software that retailed at a few hundred dollars. Kodai, Balkobot, Prism, Project Enigma, Mek, Sole AIO, Velox, Nike Shoe Bot and a dozen others all traded on a secondary market with real price discovery, and there were entire brokerages built specifically to facilitate bot resale.
Every bot also needed infrastructure to run. Hundreds of proxies so your requests didn't all come from one IP, and hundreds of aged, warmed email accounts so your orders didn't look like one person. So people built proxy companies and email companies and sold into the same thousand customers, layer on top of layer.
Bots for Bot Restocks
Bot restocks were so hard to win that people built bots to buy the bots, and then cook groups formed specifically around bot restocks, which is a paid group that helps you buy the software you use to buy shoes. The infrastructure had its own infrastructure.
The tooling here got insane. There were Twitter monitors scraping Twitter's backend that would surface a tweet the minute it existed, often before it even rendered in anyone's feed, and that tweet usually included the restock link along with the password.
So bot developers made it harder and started posting passwords as images so they couldn't be copied. Sneaker Twitter built OCR directly into the monitors. The image would get read, the password extracted, and the text dropped onto your clipboard automatically so you could paste and check out. That entire chain existed to save you a second or two, and being faster than everyone else on a bot restock was worth $4,000+ on the resale.
That was the culture. The minute a new problem existed, somebody shipped a solution, usually within days, and nobody waited for permission or a roadmap to do it.
Somebody Built a Stock Exchange for Bots
There were so many secondary deals happening that the trading itself turned into a business. For a long time every bot sale went through Discord DMs with a middleman vouching for both sides. That meant scams constantly, chargebacks, and people getting burned for thousands of dollars on a regular basis. There was no infrastructure, just trust and a guy in the middle.
So people built marketplaces to fill that gap. BotBroker, Botmart, Tidal. BotBroker ended up processing over $60 million in volume with 200+ verified bot developers on the platform. Automated escrow that held funds until the license actually transferred, API integrations directly with bot developers so keys moved instantly, phone and payment verification, dispute resolution, and live historical pricing on every bot. They took 9% from the seller and 7% from the buyer, and they ran tens of thousands of completed trades.
Read that again. A peer-to-peer exchange with escrow infrastructure, fraud prevention, and real price discovery, built so teenagers could trade software licenses used to buy shoes.
When the secondary market for your product gets big enough that it needs its own exchange, you're not in a hobby anymore.
Cook Groups
All of this generated an enormous amount of information, and information became its own product. That's what a cook group is. A Discord where people post what's dropping, when, where, and how to actually win it.
I ran one, and what people don't realize is what it costs to run a good one. My job as an owner was making sure my members had better tools than the average person and better tools than every competing group out there, which meant paying thousands of dollars a month for 100+ monitors, each one watching a single site for drops and restocks.
Groups covered shoes, collectibles, trading cards, and bots. Basically any market with crazy enough secondary value to be worth automating.
The Most Cutthroat Market I've Ever Been In
It was easy to start something here and it was unbelievably hard to keep it alive.
Everyone was sitting next to each other all day, every day, in the same Discords and on the same timeline. If your product failed on one drop, or your group missed one important release, people cancelled that night and switched to the next best thing. Not next quarter, that night.
That's why secondary bot prices were so volatile. All it took was one bad drop to completely tank a bot's price, or one amazing drop to double it. You were getting repriced by the market every single weekend based on your most recent performance, in public, in front of every competitor you had.
Everyone Was Looking for an Edge, All the Time
Every bot was developing better anti-bot bypasses every single drop, because winning one drop meant you got to tweet that you were the best bot on the market and watch your secondary price skyrocket.
Keep in mind these developers and group owners were almost all teenagers, so all of their time went into being chronically online and hunting for gaps in a market that would pay for them.
That's exactly how my Pokémon group started. I was scrolling the Pokémon subreddit and found out people couldn't secure regular product because collectors were getting there first. That's an obvious supply and demand problem and I already had the knowledge to fix it from sneakers.
PokeMrkt was the first Pokémon reselling group in the industry and it was reselling for $1,000 on the secondary market. Then I builtOminous AIO to go with it, because no collectible bot existed in the market at all before that. Ominous went for $6,000+ on the secondary market, gotreviewed across the industry alongside bots that had been around for years, and even had news articles written about it.
Same story behind Cybersole, Wrath, Splashforce, Kodai, Balkobot and the rest. Someone saw a gap and built the thing before anyone else got there.
$300,000 for a Bypass
People would find anti-bot bypasses and sell them privately in Discords to bot developers, and those bypasses went for $50,000 to $300,000 a piece. One technical exploit, sold to one buyer, because one good drop was all a bot needed to thrive.
When I tell you there were inefficiencies everywhere, believe me. People found money in literally every single little thing.
It's also why I find the current conversation slightly funny. Everyone is talking about agents automating everything like it's new. We had agents doing this in 2017, we just called it something else and the use case was completely for monetary gain.
Where Everyone Went
None of this was ever really about sneakers. The actual skill was finding an inefficiency before anyone else and building something to exploit it before the window closed, and that transfers to literally anything.
So when people aged out or the market cooled, they scattered, and they went on to dominate whatever they touched next. Some of the biggest crypto groups are run by people who came out of Sneaker Twitter. So are some of the biggest traders. The biggest Roblox developers came from here. So did the hungriest early employees at hypergrowth startups, the ones who show up and outwork the entire building without needing anyone to tell them what to do. And a growing number of the most cracked VC-backed founders you can name right now were in these Discords as teenagers.
It's the same pattern every single time. They show up in a new market, spend a week understanding it better than people who've been in it for years, find the gap, and build. That's not luck and it's not a coincidence. That's what happens when you spend your teenage years somewhere that being second meant making nothing.
What It Actually Was
Sneaker Twitter was about a thousand teenagers hunting for gaps in a market where every single participant was already spending money on tools to make more money.
That combination created one of the most competitive environments I've ever seen. No barriers to entry, no protection once you were in, and public repricing every weekend. So people stayed online for years straight trying to beat the person next to them, 24/7.
The only environment I’ve found that comes close is working at a hypergrowth startup, and I say that having done both.
The proof is in where those people ended up. Slash, Whop, Browserbase, Daydream Dental, Tradepost, Soar, Scout Education, Axiom, Pump.Fun, Prime Hydration, Scoutapp.ai (acquired by StockX), CollectPure, and plenty more. Companies founded by or hiring out of a subculture most people wrote off as kids buying shoes. They weren't buying shoes, they were building the infrastructure, and they learned to build it in a market that punished them instantly for getting it wrong.
