Is The Next Gold Rush on Your Face?

Meta just dropped AI glasses with built-in displays for well under a grand.

But a bigger deal (for you) is that the SDK launches this year.

That means your product can be on millions of faces by early next year, with little to no competition.

As growth obsessed operators, we’re looking for a moment like Facebook ads 2012, an arbitrage window where first movers scale huge empires while attention costs nothing.

Meta is pouring over $10 billion into smart glasses, already moving millions of units and proving there's real demand. Microsoft and Twitch are jumping in as strategic partners.

The market's set to explore, projected to grow 10x to $93 billion by 2030.

And the big rumor floating around certain circles is that Apple will launch their first smart glasses product in 2026. If it’s anything like the Airpods or Apple Watch, we could be witnessing the birth of a new category.

In this article, I break down:

Here's how you capture this window before it slams shut.

But first, let's address the elephant in the room.

I've been publicly critical of Meta (you can dig up old quotes of mine in Marketwatch, WSJ, and others).

These are the people who looked at Snapchat's explosive growth in 2016 and thought, "We need to know what they're doing. But their traffic is encrypted."

So they bought a VPN company and turned this privacy app into a Snapchat for network (this story is crazy if you dig into it).

Fast forward, Meta is pushing users to let them scan your entire camera roll (every private photo, every screenshot, every embarrassing selfie you never posted). And they won’t answer if this will be used for AI training.

But here's the thing that makes this whole situation maddening: their hardware team is absolutely crushing it.

Walk through the Meta Reality Labs offices, scroll through the engineers' Twitter feeds, and you'll see something you rarely find in Big Tech anymore. These guys are genuinely pumped.

And speaking as someone who owns multiple pieces of Meta hardware (Ray Bans, Quests), these are killer pieces of tech.

But here's what Meta isn't telling you about the SDK launch...

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The SDK drops later this year, but there are big limitations. There’s no full AI and gesture control access at launch.

This creates two arbitrage windows:

Now: Build simple, high-value apps using basic sensor access while competition is small.

Later: Dominate when you get access to advanced features (but only for builders already on the platform).

Meanwhile, Meta and Google ads are octagon brawls where CACs are up 89% since 2020. Glasses are the new wild west. Organic reach is massive before the ad auctioneers move in.

This pattern has minted fortunes before. Three recent examples prove it:

Growth doesn’t come from out-spending. It comes from out-thinking. And the pattern is always the same: new platform, overlooked gap, outsized return.

The Parasitic Play (NGL): NGL definitely did not build a social network. But they sure did hijack Instagram's.

Their anonymous Q&A feature bolted onto IG Stories and pulled in 15 million installs with near-$0 CAC by leveraging Insta's network graph.

The First-Mover Play (Twitch Prime): When Twitch launched Prime subs in 2016, Streamers who pushed Prime subs tripled their revenue on Amazon’s dime.

The API Play (DoNotPay): Wrapped GPT-3 into a “robot lawyer,” hit 250k users in a month, built a $230M company.

The window is measured in quarters, not years. Here are four plays to run immediately:

Meta is far from the only unlocked door. Three other arbitrage opportunities to exploit.

Apple App Intents (Spring 2026): Apple is about to flip the switch on a new framework that turns Siri (hopefully one that works) into a personal OS with your context.

Imagine saying "Hey Siri, take the transcript of my last call and make a sales presentation for my next meeting." Your AI instantly pulls the call recording, extracts key points, builds slides, and formats everything in your brand template.

If your brand handles sales presentations and you've built the App Intent integration, you just owned that phrase in consumers' minds. Apple could feature you keynote demos or the App Store. You'll get millions in free distribution. The builders who crack these contextual workflows before launch will own entire categories of human-AI interaction.

AI Tool Directories (like MCPs): Anthropic created MCP as the universal standard for AI integration and it's working. Claude already has a full MCP directory, OpenAI has an early version with featured apps, Perplexity's is coming, and breaking yesterday: Apple is building MCP support directly into App Intents.

This means ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models will soon control iPhone and Mac apps autonomously using the same protocol. Build a specialized MCP tool now and get featured across multiple AI platforms simultaneously. The first wave of devs will get distribution from Claude's directory, OpenAI's featured spots, and soon Apple's entire ecosystem.

(and given the 100s of MCP directory websites you’re going to get a nice SEO bump too)

Facebook ads were a goldmine in 2012 because no one understood them. By 2014, costs had increased 4x and the gold rush was over.

Early adopters always capture outsized returns because they're solving problems before markets become efficient.

Meta is already signaling future restrictions by limiting SDK access. When full features unlock, expect revenue sharing requirements, content moderation, and platform gatekeepers. The "wild west" phase is happening in a few weeks.

The developer waitlist is live today. By late 2026, this will be another crowded platform.

You can keep fighting in blood-red oceans, burning budget against companies with more debt and more desperation.

Or you can walk through the unlocked doors right now, where distribution is free, attention is cheap, and the platform is begging for builders.

Find the backdoor. Right now, there are multiple unlocked doors waiting for builders who think in platforms, not just products.

Every month you wait, the window gets smaller and the competition gets that much fiercer.

The only question is how many opportunities you can capture before the doors slam shut?

Let’s go build. Let’s make something great.

And if you’re making something cool you know where to find me. 👇

🎁 Get rewarded for sharing! I’ve scraped and distilled every lesson from the entire AppMafia course (and built a custom AI trained on it all). This means you get the exact frameworks, insights, and viral strategies behind their $36M empire.

Invite your friends to join, and when they sign up, you’ll unlock my App Mafia GPT.

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