Multiple people aged 25 earning 25,000 a month, growing 25% a year, in the same kind of business: that combination is the rule of 25. When a market pays junior people far above market rates, it usually means demand is so strong that buyers accept unproven providers, which points to a supply-demand imbalance.
What Is the Rule of 25?
The rule of 25 is a rule of thumb for identifying markets where demand far exceeds supply: find a business where several people around 25 years old are earning at least 25,000 per month and growing at least 25% a year. The age is the load-bearing number; the income and growth figures exist mainly to make the rule memorable. A 25-year-old earning 50,000 a month in a fast-growing niche is an even stronger signal.
The logic behind it comes from basic microeconomics. When many people want to buy something and few people can provide it, prices and margins rise, and whoever can deliver captures most of the value. The hard part is detecting that imbalance from the outside, because public business advice is full of false positives (hype that sells courses) and false negatives (quietly profitable niches whose owners have no incentive to talk).
The rule comes from the Brazilian creator Bruno Faggion, who presented it in a video on his YouTube channel in May 2026. As presented, it is the speaker's own heuristic, not an academic framework, and the examples that follow are his first-hand observations rather than audited data. He uses the word heuristic deliberately: a heuristic is a pocket rule, a shortcut for deciding where to look, not a proof that the opportunity will pay off.
Why Young Earners Are a Reliable Market Signal
Twenty-five-year-olds rarely earn high incomes, so when they do, something unusual is happening on the demand side. Most careers that pay well at that age require elite credentials or years of training. A field where ordinary young people earn adult-level money is one where buyers are desperate enough to hire whoever shows up.
The arithmetic makes the point. In Brazil, earning 25,000 a month at 25 is close to unheard of outside a few paths: a small set of people in finance who studied at places like ITA and joined investment funds, or a doctor who entered medical school at 18, graduated at 24, and is working brutal on-call shifts. That doctor's income often drops afterwards, when residency begins. Outside those narrow tracks, 25,000 a month at 25 is not trivial.
Age matters on the supply side too. People around 25 tend to take more risks, adopt new tools and consumer habits earlier, and have a low cost of living that lets them experiment. Older professionals, who are more established and more risk-averse, either do not know the field exists or have no reason to enter it. Supply stays low and stays inexperienced, which keeps the imbalance alive for a few years.
The pattern is especially telling in B2B services. Companies normally prefer experienced vendors, so if a business hires a young provider, demand must be strong enough to override that preference. As the rule's originator puts it: a company paying an immature provider is a strong signal that it needs the job done more than it needs a polished résumé.
Past Waves That Fit the Pattern
The speaker walks through several Brazilian examples of markets that matched the rule before they became obvious. Each one looked informal or slightly embarrassing at the time, which is exactly why supply stayed low and the early entrants earned outsized income. The table below compresses the timeline he describes.
| Wave | Roughly when | Who won | Why supply stayed low |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website creation and SEO | 2010-2012 (earliest entrants around 2005-2007) | Self-taught young builders | Nobody senior knew how to build or rank a site |
| Digital marketing and apps | 2014-2016 | Young freelancers in copy, launch marketing, paid ads | Agencies and older marketers dismissed the space |
| Content creation and online courses | Em 2019 | Young YouTubers and influencers | Older professionals thought it was undignified |
- Website creation (around 2010-2012): Building sites for clients or for search rankings was new, everyone needed one, and very few people could make one. Inflation-adjusted, the strong earners of that era were making what would be roughly 10,000 a month in today's money, with a few reaching 25,000. A generation of young self-taught builders and SEO practitioners earned well, several of whom went on to become major YouTube and web figures in Brazil. The speaker names Peter Jordan, who built sites before founding Ei Nerd and made the lyrics site Cifras, and Kib Louco, run by Tabet, as examples of that generation. He believes Jordan started around 2005, maybe 2007, though he is not certain of the exact year.
- Digital marketing (around 2014-2016): Launch copywriting, paid ads on Facebook and Google, and funnel work paid young freelancers far above what their peers earned, while agencies staffed by older professionals barely knew the space existed. On the product side, mobile apps boomed in the same window, and the people who rode that wave did well too.
- Content creation and online courses (around 2019): A 30-year-old did not want to become a blogger; the career carried a stigma. Older professionals dismissed being an influencer as undignified, so audiences of all ages watched the young creators who did show up. Demand for online courses was strong enough that people bought them from 25-year-olds simply because nobody more senior was offering them.
Two lessons repeat across every wave. First, the opportunity never looked obvious while it was happening; each one felt saturated, informal, or hard to explain to your parents. Second, these windows last only a few years, so the realistic goal is to earn heavily during the imbalance and either move on or mature inside the niche as the wave passes. The speaker admits he lived through these cycles without joining all of them: at 20, in 2010, he heard about people making money building sites and shrugged it off as informal; later he dismissed digital marketing as scam-adjacent; and he only entered content creation through his existing business, after the Instagram window had partly closed.
A Companion Heuristic: Bad Providers Winning
The rule of 25 is not the only screening tool the speaker uses, and knowing the second one sharpens how you use the first. His earlier heuristic says to look for businesses where bad providers or bad companies make a lot of money, because poor service plus high profit is another marker of an imbalance.
His standard example is the Brazilian cartório, the notary office. The queueing, the user experience and the customer service are famously poor, yet the business prints money. The catch is entry: most cartórios are awarded through a public exam, so you cannot simply decide to compete with them. But the same logic applies in open markets. If a mediocre provider is thriving, demand is outrunning the supply of competence, and a competent newcomer has room to capture value.
How to Apply the Rule Today Without Falling
The speaker's current candidate, offered as personal observation rather than verified market data, is AI automation agencies: small teams building automation workflows for companies. He argues it remains far less saturated than the Brazilian internet bubble suggests, because most people outside that corner of the web have never heard of it as a career. His test is concrete: ask your school and university friends if they know anyone running an automation agency, and how many names come back. If the answer is one or two at most, the career is not yet a normal option, which is the point.
He is also explicit about demand: every company in Brazil will eventually need automation the way it eventually needed a website, social media presence, content and ads. The wave will not last forever, but he believes it will run for a few years, which may be enough to get rich while young if you are good at the work.
The honest caveat is that many people are entering this space, and the speaker says so himself. The rule of 25 does not certify that a niche is safe; it tells you where to go look. Verify with real people, not with internet discourse, because hype-driven false positives are exactly what course sellers produce. When someone is selling a course about a niche, that is usually a sign the niche has already stopped paying as well.
Run the check in this order:
- Find three or more real people, around 25 years old, in the same field. Prefer names you can actually talk to, not names quoted from someone else's channel.
- Ask what they actually earn per month and how fast their revenue is growing. You need the 25,000 and the 25% picture, or something better.
- Prefer fields older professionals ignore or dismiss, since that keeps supply low and the imbalance alive.
- Check whether companies are hiring these young providers despite their inexperience, especially in B2B services, where clients normally demand maturity.
- Treat the window as temporary. Plan now for what you do when the wave passes: move to the next imbalance or mature into a durable position inside the niche.
Where to Look Next and How to Learn the Skills
A wave is only useful if you can actually do the work it rewards, and the speaker closes his video by asking his audience to name candidates he did not cover, such as TikTok Shop or agencies that connect brands with influencers. He would rather crowdsource names of real people the commenters know personally than repeat second-hand hype. Whether TikTok, TikTok Shop or something nobody has named yet qualifies, the same verification steps apply before you commit.
If the fields the rule keeps flagging are digital, the barrier to entry is skills, and skills are learnable. Structured programs aimed at exactly this gap include Crazystack Typescript, a course taught by Gustavo Dev Doido at crazystack.com.br, and his Bootcamp do Dev Doido, which trains beginners toward employable web development skills. The point is not to endorse any specific program but to note that when a wave appears, the people who move fastest are usually the ones who already invested in learning the underlying craft. Whatever niche passes your rule-of-25 screen, budget time to become genuinely good at delivering it, because the window rewards competence more than timing alone.
Is the Rule of 25 a Proven Economic Framework?
No. It is a heuristic from a business content creator, presented as his own mental model in May 2026. It is a screening tool for where to investigate, not a guarantee that any specific market will pay off.
Do the Numbers Have to Be Exactly 25, 25,000, and 25%?
No. The originator says the repeated 25 exists to make the rule memorable and easy to send to friends in WhatsApp groups. A 25-year-old earning 50,000 a month growing 100% a year fits the spirit even better; the essential variable is the young age.
Why Does Age Matter More Than Income?
Because 25-year-olds rarely earn high incomes, so their presence in a field signals that demand overwhelms the supply of experienced professionals. Young risk-takers also enter new markets earlier than established workers, who are more risk-averse and already established elsewhere.
What Is the Difference Between a False Positive and a False Negative Here?
A false positive is a niche that looks like a supply-demand imbalance but is mostly hype, typically promoted by people selling courses about it. A false negative is a genuinely profitable imbalance that looks unimpressive from outside, often because insiders stay quiet to extend the opportunity's lifespan.
What Is an Example of a Market the Rule Might Flag Today?
The speaker personally observes AI automation agencies in Brazil as a candidate, while noting many newcomers are entering. He recommends verifying income and growth by talking to real practitioners instead of trusting online discourse, and he floats TikTok Shop and influencer agencies as open questions for his audience to test.
How Long Does One of These Windows Last?
Only a few years, according to every example the speaker gives. That is why older professionals rarely catch a wave: by the time a niche is respectable, the imbalance has closed. The realistic strategy is to earn heavily during the window and then either migrate to the next imbalance or build a durable position inside the niche before it matures.
Turn the Knowledge Already in Your Videos Into an Article
The rule of 25 works because it turns scattered observations into a repeatable model, and the same is true of most good ideas sitting inside YouTube videos. If you explain frameworks like this on camera, that knowledge deserves a written form that search engines and readers can find long after the video scrolls away.
With Skala Blog, you paste a YouTube URL, the video is transcribed, and you get a structured article draft you can review and publish. If your channel is where you think out loud about markets, opportunities, or craft, Skala Blog is how that thinking reaches the readers who would never sit through a 17-minute video.
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