>inundated with emails from his friends telling him to check out our landing page.
when later we learn only 5 people viewed the ad and 2 people clicked. Either way, cool story, the details really do get to me.
That's an important distinction. I was wondering what I was missing.
I agree, semantically it's not a very accurate title. But actually, I'd say that in the long-run the chain of events that resulted from this hack (i.e. me moving to America and then my startup getting funded etc) has led to me personally benefiting much more than $120k. Essentially it was the main cause to making me millions of dollars. The $120k was just the most quantifiable from the initial hack.
The takeaway of all this: always push, always aggressive.
I imagine the candidates were sorted digitally at multiple points to narrow things down and share among those hiring. During the arduous process the weary workers take their glance away from the screen to relax for a second only to notice their company's name -- or bosses face in an odd place on the web page they now have memorized from screen burn-in and that's precisely when this ad is almost (IMO not almost) guaranteed.
My LinkedIn is pretty invaluable for scoping out potential clients and making an initial approach. I don't usually try to use InMails, but I'll figure out the right person to talk to and make an email approach with that information.
The main point of the article was to run a LinkedIn ad to get accepted into AngelPad and raise money, and that's totally fair (and commendable!).
But sprinkled throughout the article, there are quotes like:
> I've co-founded two startups that have raised ~$90 million in venture capital (Shyp and Vungle) and have created hundreds of jobs in five different countries.
> Vungle has grown to hundreds of employees and over $25 million in funding.
Is that really the metric of success we're going for? Give anybody $90 million and they can pretty trivially create hundreds of jobs.
I don't know what Vungle's revenue is, but if we're not in a bubble yet, raising a bunch of money, leaving the company, and touting it "hustling" isn't helping.
EDIT: I'd like to clarify briefly that I'm not downplaying raising money. Going out and fundraising is really hard (I've done it), but so aren't dozens of other tasks at a company.
+1 to anybody who is able to successfully bring in funding, but I've met too many people who have felt like their company has "made it" once they've raised money -- when in fact that's just the beginning.
With funding comes outside pressure from investors that seeps into and permeates the entire venture. The pressure to show rapid growth, alone, changes what kind of people get hired, how their responsibilities are structured, and how they interact with the pre-funding team. Founders will be pushed out or replaced by career executives from the industry, early employees will be managed out or grow bored with the monotony of an established business, and anyone involved in raising the initial rounds will likely be way out of their depth by the time growth stage funding rolls around.
Let's face it, we monkeys like shiny trophies for well quantified metrics to put on our wall and taking credit for a bunch of zeroes on a check is a lot more practical than for the sum of all of the work and value added by a company that survives for years or decades after you leave it.
it wouldn't have been as catchy if the title was "here's a tactic that helped me start a company that became profitable and delivering value" ;)
OTOH, the campaign to get the last slot cost him only $0.01.
PS: Don't buy a Ferrari if you get funded, it's wiser to milk the poverty appearance card for all it's worth. (I know a guy that recent sold his startup to EMC for 8 digits that ran around with 3 missing hubcaps.)
> The word “hustle” has lost its meaning. Everyone who works hard is called a “hustler,” even if they don’t win. Fuck conceptualization of ‘hustling’ as working hard. I only care about results. A great hustle without results isn’t a great hustle. With this hustle, my goal was to get the attention of the AngelPad founder.
are just downright blatant and uncomfortable. If everybody thinks in this way then we're doomed. Unfortunately nowadays many do seem to do so.
I don't know about Shyp tho, but they have a lot of buzz and an innovative product, which in my mind is a success...although they still have a LONG way to go to prove themselves. So I get your point. I don't think funding is defines success, but more so a strong sign that your on your way making something work. And I totally agree...funding in itself isn't something you should brag about.
However, the # of jobs Jack helped create IMHO is 100% a success. It's super rewarding and changes lives (most of the time) in a great way.
The story starts in 2012 when it was a "Adwords hack" ->
https://pando.com/2012/05/02/vungles-co-founders-hustle-thei...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/06/25/dont-try-t...
And the wheelworks started again in April of this year ->
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-linkedin-hack-that-turned...
I am writing the above with respect - I do the exact same thing, re-use and re-cycle great content as often as you can, it's a might harder to create the story than to perpetuate it and market it.
The basics are covered brilliantly in PG's "The Submarine" if you haven't seen it http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I haven't read that article from PG, I'll definitely check it out!
If the ads aren't annoying, I leave ad block off.
I'm also guessing that some people might have just told him they'd seen his face on a LinkedIn ad. Not necessarily clicked through to it.
They'll likely attribute it to "frequency illusion" and you'll gain a much higher profile in their eyes.
Then close it. :)
Not sure what the service would provide on top of that. Can you elucidate further?
If by "they", you meant the article writer, then the reasons for the downvotes are likely because the article writer explained how that number was achieved.
If by "they", you meant LinkedIn, then the downvotes are likely because people thought you meant the article writer.
This is just a case where the pronoun just doesn't give enough information to keep people from being confused.
Facebook recently paid me a bounty for pointing out a problem that enabled this type of pinpoint targeting accuracy on their ad platform despite a policy that greatly limited it. It's interesting that LinkedIn doesn't consider it a privacy problem. I noticed that you could create custom audiences for ads by simply using anyone's FB vanity URL and appending @facebook.com to target by email. So if the vanity url of the target was facebook.com/mark, then you could target an ad to that person by simply adding mark@facebook.com to a custom audience list. They have now fixed it, but this same thing the author did here could have also been done on FB until about 2 months ago (and can still be done, but now you need their actual email address to target them).
similarly, with the facebook thing. I saw that Facebook is rolling back usage of the facebook.com email addresses, so I'm not sure how long that will keep working.
So what happened!?!? I'd love to believe that anyone with such a clever hack could get some mileage out of whatever came next. Alas, it sounds as if this is the classic Cinderella story with only mice and pumpkins at the end. Darn! A follow-up post with the rest of the story would be very welcome.
The sequence of events basically was: - Thursday saw the TC post, same day created Linkedin ad campaign - Friday got a call from Thomas - next week we got the final spot (on about a Thursday) - about 3 days later we were on a flight to san francisco to join Angelpad (+ $120k at this point) - about 10 weeks after moving to San Francisco we started raising our seed round. We ended up raising ~$2 mil led by Google Ventures - about a year later raised $6.5mil Series A - about a year after that raised $17m Series B - after that the company kept growing and has opened offices in various countries etc
for myself personally, I moved more towards advising a few different startups.
Title is definitely a bit misleading, but at the end of the day, you gotta do what you gotta do to get the clicks.
Someone did something similar using FB to prank their friend:
http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...
HN discussion:
I'd think that with anything like this; if it were illegal, then likely the individual themselves would have to sue me. Hopefully they wouldn't want to take it that far once I explained to them that I was just targeting them and trying to get their attention etc. Certainly for Thomas, Vungle turned out to be quite a good investment thus far and a nice story, so I hope he wont sue me ;)
I'm pretty sure LinkedIn ads weren't intended to have a picture of the guy's face who you're targeting as the ad though!
And wouldn't this have worked just as well if he had targeted all employees of AngelPad? The CPM would still be pretty low...
Side-note: Similar and just as amusing story, but with FB ads - http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...
This hack will continue to work for as long as we fool ourselves as to the new nature of the world
