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Ask HN: Did you ever do anything unethical to get your startup off the ground?
A lot of mixergy interviewers say that in the early days they've done things that would be considered unethical in order to get their sites off the ground.
A good example of this would be Facebook, which has done a ton of things early on.
So have you yourself(or the company you worked for) done anything that would be considered unethical to get the business off the ground?(if you are worried about your reputation just use a throwaway account)
This may involve:
- spamming comments to get links/users
- creating a ton of pages with keywords to get long tail google traffic
- scraping other's websites to fill your DB
- putting up an order page when your site wasn't ready
- putting up 235 users online when you only had one
- pretending to be bigger than you were
- voting up your own submission on HN/Digg/Reddit
- creating a fake back story to make your startup interesting(we just want to save the world, we don't care about money)
- astroturfing your site with fake accounts
- sending fake numbers to get coverage(i.e. traffic, revenue, profit)
- buying an email list to spam people
- promising unrealistic delivery dates
- using the user's email address to spam their address book
- pretending the site has users when it doesn't(this hottie is 5 miles away from you, register to contact her)
- etc.
- sjs382 16y agoI wouldn't call anything he did unethical, but check out this interview with Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo guy) about his previous startup: http://mixergy.com/gabriel-weinberg-duck-duck-go-interview/ http://mixergy.com/gabriel-weinberg-duck-duck-go-interview/ With all of the respect I already had for him, his candor in this interview gave me even more respect for him.
- jbhelms 16y agoI contacted a company to buy Sex Offender data. I called twice and then sent 3 emails. After a month of no replies I wrote a program that screen scraped their site.
- steveklabnik 16y agoIs screen scraping really unethical? I mean, you've sent me a bunch of text... whatever I do with it is my business.
- vaksel 16y agoit is to some people...a) you are breaking the ToS b) you are stealing their content to resell/republish it as your own
- zepolen 16y agoWhat if I never read or even open the ToS and proceed directly to screen scraping your site? Afaik there is no law that mandates you must read/agree to the ToS before loading a website. In fact, what if the ToS states 'If you visit this site, you must pay us 1000 dollars', are you now liable? Despite the fact that just to read the ToS you had to visit said site. My point is that only a court will decide what happens, and just because something is in the ToS doesn't mean it gives you carte blanch to do whatever you please.
- nailer 16y agoSure, ToS are crap - they're not contracts and any 'extra rights' the site gets are indeed not worth the electrons they're printed on. But copywritten content is protected by good-old actual law.
- ddemchuk 16y agoto the owners of the content, it's similar to scanning a book at a library then reselling it without their permission
- jerf 16y agoResist metaphors for this sort of thing. Resist them strongly. There are no physical analogues for the internet that are close enough to matter. When I scan a book page, the author and publisher are so untroubled they don't even know, indeed, they can't know. When I look at a web page, they have to actually serve it to me, costing them some amount of money. Money you can only call trivial when you aren't scraping pages by the thousands. This is enough to render your metaphor irrelevant by virtue of significant, both in the sense of "sizable" and in the sense of "relevant", difference. There's no physical analogue to scraping a database-driven site. The question of exactly how legal it is probably won't be settled until that fact penetrates the legal system; until then it depends on what metaphor you sell to a given judge.
- lsb 16y agoRemember, they can't copyright facts, no matter how much sweat of the brow it took to compile those facts. Recall Feist v Rural, wherein someone made another phone book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel...
- nailer 16y agoDepends on the country - but yes for the US you're OK.
- dotBen 16y agoIn US this is true, in UK it isn't. A great case is the UK Post Code system (which is much more specific than the US zip code system here - no more than 15 letter-boxes share a unique post code in UK). A number of people have created Post Code to lat/long conversion tables. They're all facts but because they have been worked out they are copyrightable. To stop copying the providers introduce slight variances in the data to track duplication and usually jump on top of it. I don't believe that would fly here in the USA
- aristus 16y agoSo... buy a copy of all of then and throw away the diffs? :D
- macca321 16y agobuying them all would defeat the purpose
- notahacker 16y agoAn even more unusual UK example would be the "copyright" claimed over the football fixture lists you'll find on any popular sport site - they're supposed to pay a large licensing fee to a company called Football Dataco even if they source the data independently.
- notahacker 16y ago
- ddemchuk 16y agolooks like someone has a bit of an Affiliate Marketing background :)
- vaksel 16y agoonly a little, make about 1-3K/mo from it.
- ddemchuk 16y agowell, then as a user of this site as well as presumably affiliate forums, you know that this site isn't too keen on the methods you listed compared to other sites where it's considered essential TO DO those things in order to succeed, no questions asked. It really all depends on how far you're willing to push the boundaries
- vaksel 16y agowith affiliate marketing I stuck to white hat methods, which is why I wasn't making a lot.
- endlessvoid94 16y agoFor ThatHigh.com, I searched textsfromlastnight for stories containing the phrase "marijuana" etc. Worked like a charm.
- Vindexus 16y agoThen what? Posted comments pointing to ThatHigh.com I'm guessing. Did you just put the link or did you say something like "Sounds like something from thathigh.com"? Did they eventually get removed as spam?
- endlessvoid94 16y agonah, nothing like that. i just used it as a seed for content. there were very few, honestly. but it was a good start.
- HNer 16y agomost of top ones without the bottom 5. The nub of the matter is this, IMO it's OK to do what you have to do to gain momentum even if that would be classified as technically spam or what have you, as long as you do it with style. This means sending relevant content to people who want it but just don't know it yet, NOT sending people stuff they may never want and what you do send has to be 100% pure quality. 90% wouldn't agree with this but IMO it depends on where you're coming from and what the odds are against you. Just do it well and make sure that the end result is a positive for your potential clients.
- maxharris 16y agoI would be very surprised if any of these things will help you at all. None of them provide things that people really want. More importantly, attempting them distracts you from figuring out how to find out and make what your customers really want. For example, you can try to spam to your heart's content, but people have this thing called a back button. Even if you can get a few people to bite, they'll most likely ignore you once they figure out that there's nothing there. You can try to say "235 users online" when there aren't any, but that won't actually give users the experience they want. It might fool them for a little while, but that won't matter anyway if there's no reason for them to stay.
- vaksel 16y agothe point with the "235 users online" would be to get the user to signup...then once they are signed up and in your database, you can a) tout that you have X users...which will get your coverage + more users b) can eventually email them back telling them that the site was massively improved.
- endlessvoid94 16y agoI disagree. These methods help exposure, and a fraction of those users will actually want what you have. That's why spamming works.
- prs 16y agoGreg posted a nice compilation of shady tactics used during the startup period of major internet companies at http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/ruthless-enough-for-startup.html http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/ruthless-enough-for-star... A quick summary: Facebook: Spammed Harvard Students BitTorrent: Free Porn as Initial Bait MySpace: Spammed >100M on Launch Date It appears as if (slightly) shady techniques can give you the advantage you need to succeed.
- wmf 16y agoAnd let us not forget the more innocent days of 1996, when putting ads on free email was considered borderline shady: http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/18/ps-i-love-you-get-your-free-email-at-hotmail/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/18/ps-i-love-you-get-your-free...
- sprout 16y agoIt may not be so much innocence as different cost considerations. In 1996 bandwidth was at far more of a premium than it is now, so even the modest demands of Google AdSense would have had a much greater cost to the user. And certainly Hotmail remains slow, though not so much for lack of bandwidth anymore.
- nailer 16y agoBitTorrent's wasn't unethical or shady (unless you think all adult content is shady). They'd licensed the content - which was, IIRC, an kind of free teaser ad for 'LightSpeed' porn - which I remember as being an odd name for a porn site. Caused a huge fuss on Slashdot.
- nl 16y agoThe version I heard was that they got it off Usenet, where it had been posted by the supplier. Sounded like a sensible way to seed the service, really.
- jacquesm 16y agoThe interesting bit here is that that tactic did come back to haunt myspace, but in a different way than you'd expect. The guys that built youtube used the same tactic but by bitting myspace users to come and use youtube.
- thafman 16y agoI wouldn't consider most of the actions listed "unethical" per-se, some actions like; "creating a ton of pages with keywords to get long tail google traffic" are legitimate, while "buying an email list to spam people" can be downright illegal.
- vaksel 16y agopeople have different levels of what they consider unethical. as far as keyword stuffing...google considers that blackhat so you can get banned when they find you
- jscore 16y agoGreat list, and couldn't come at a better time for my startup.
- sabj 16y agoTaking the "Liar's Poker" approach eh? Cautionary tale >> guidebook
- AmberShah 16y agoThis is probably a weighted thread since many people are connected to their startups through their usernames and wouldn't want to post. For me, the answer is no except for "promising unrealistic delivery dates". For me this wasn't about lying but partly about just being unrealistic with myself and also about setting certain goals publicly to hold myself accountable. I don't think this is in the same boat as the other unethical items mentioned, but of course I may just think that because that's the only one I did...
- vaksel 16y agoyeah that's why I said that they should use a throwaway account if they are worried.
- mahmud 16y agoWhat exactly do you gain from this "poll"? If you want blackhat, go to PPC and adware peddling forums. Otherwise this thread does nothing but validate creepy behavior on HN.
- vaksel 16y agothe point is to show that most companies have done shady shit in the early days and that's one of the main reasons why they managed to survive long enough to turn legit
- mahmud 16y agoMost companies? the secret to every great fortune is not a 'forgotten crime', de Balzac's opinion notwithstanding. If we're looking for a justification for a company's under-performance, the solution is not to look for excuses, the solution is to reflect honestly and question our existing ideas and approaches. Otherwise we're no different than couch-potatoes dismissing all athletes as "dopers", while drawn ourselves in a self-righteous bag of Doritos and a liter of coke. And lest you think I am being a hypocrite and taking the moral high-ground in an appeal to cheap applause and upvotes; let me say that I am all in favor of any ruthless business tactic that furthers your market dominance. Undercut the competition, corner them, etc. But get there, first, through quality and great service. Not by shutting down their mail servers. Go through their garbage, but don't phish their accounts. Point out their shortcomings to the public, but don't lawyer up and sue them out of existence or appeal to xenophobia or use a government crutch to ban them from the market. etc. There is a difference between war and genocide; neither is excusable, but one of them appeals to my own warped sense of chivalry and machismo, while the other fills me with disgust. Of course, all of this is just my opinion, and is entitled neither to a response nor agreement.
- callmeed 16y agoWe sent unsolicited emails to as many addresses as we could (manually) find online over a week or two. We're in a B2B niche so it wasn't hard to find directories online. Never used any bulk email tool, just copied and pasted. This was 6ish years ago. I wasn't aware of spam laws at the time. I wouldn't recommend it but it worked.
- mrfish 16y agoMy experience is that the more you try to trick the system, the less likely it will work. Advertising is one thing. If you do something like fake accounts or make yourself bigger then you are, you loose the grass roots first users who become your biggest supports when you want to grow from spam lists. You should read what economists say. Know your customer. If you can't find any don't do it. Know your competition. If you can't define it, don't do it. Know your business. If you don't love what you do, don't do it.
- phamilton 16y agoWe had a buy/sell site aimed at university students. At the same time, 2 other sites cropped up. So we posted links to items from one site on the other. Those two sites got in a pretty nasty fight ("We didn't do it" "Yeah right you ^&^&") Meanwhile we just continued growing as usual.
- keefe 16y agolike so many of these posts, I am left wondering... why is that unethical?
- endtime 16y agoTricking your competitors into fighting and mistrusting one another? You don't think that's unethical?
- keefe 16y agono? I'm not abusing someone's trust or breaking my word. Every other consideration is subordinate to my aim.
- endtime 16y agoThat's a pretty measly definition of ethics. Under your definition, murder is ethical so long as you don't lie about it.
- keefe 16y agoherp derp I obviously meant it to the most extreme case possible. I could counterargue that I gave my word not to do any wanton killing and therefore it's prohibited and then I can wedge whatever I want into that system.
- Magneus 16y agoCall me an elitist asshole, but I find your tone infuriating. Clean it up. Learn some respect.
- hooande 16y agoI was part of a startup years ago that did many of those things and much more. I still won't go into the details of what it was that my cofounder did, but it made a big difference. It was a social networking site, before social networking sites really existed (circa 2000). I remember when the site consisted of me, him, his mom and our kindest friends. Got maybe a few hundred unique visitors per day, at best. Then he did X and suddenly traffic spiked. It was a thousand uniques a day. Then tens of thousands. Then it got picked up by google. He did even more questionable things and traffic increased even more. Next thing we knew, it had 200,000+ registered users and was making $50k/month. None of those things he did ever came back to haunt us. The site itself was kind of sketch (much more myspace than facebook), so that might have helped. I wouldn't do any of the things he did for any legitimate startup that I found. At the same time, it seemed like it worked. Once you have "critical mass" then the entire situation changes. Just an anecdote to answer your question. Obviously YMMV.
- Timothee 16y agoThat sounds interesting, but without the interesting part it's much less so.
- hooande 16y agoFine. In broad terms, he leveraged the file sharing networks of the time. He put the name of our site on files that were shared very often and we had our college friends seed them on various services. It seemed crazy at first, but there is a big difference between no one seeing your name and thousands of people seeing your name. In retrospect, it was a brilliant move. My point was that critical mass and viral growth are powerful concepts, and some times all it takes is one little push to get things moving.
- gfodor 16y agoThis isn't unethical. This is a brilliant marketing tactic. (Putting the name in there, not the actual sharing, which I guess is unethical depending on what you're sharing.)
- konad 16y agoI used to crash our main competitor's email & login server at 6.01pm when free dial-up calls started at 6pm. They ran on NT and if you opened tcp/ip port 0, the kernel crashed. Happy times.
- mahmud 16y agoDidn't any part of you refuse to do this at a more visceral level? How could you sleep at night knowing you're cheating to get ahead? Does it even matter if you 'win'? I can understand gaming Google and public opinion, but directly vandalizing someone's property and hindering their business is unconscionable. I really want to understand the justification for this. And I say this as someone whose moral system is flexible enough to accept bank robbery (but not purse-snatching.)
- sprout 16y agoI don't see how crashing a Windows box is any worse than robbing Goldman Sachs. (In both cases innocent people suffer, but the target is pretty reviled.) I say this as someone who likes to claim he's chaotic good, but really is pretty much lawful good.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bbq 16y agoSo because the competitor used Windows, konad's actions were justified? If that is the case, that's a very weak justification.
- AndrewWarner 16y agoSpamming comes up a ton in my interviews. Most recently, the founder of Match.com said that's how he got his site's first users.
- yread 16y agoI work at a company that did some "email campaigns" and many worse things in the beginning. And it helped a lot - getting as many sales from a smallish 10M country in Europe as from half of the US
- Ixiaus 16y agoA startup I worked for did all of this and more - I left because some of their tactics were getting far too shady for me. Scraping business listings to populate your DB to make your ad network look like it was being used wasn't so unethical as some of their spamming adventures.
- michaelfairley 16y agoIs it just me, or does anyone else want to be able to answer "no" to this question without having to even think about it?
- ziadbc 16y agoDon't get caught up in a scam mentality. Instead think of ethical pivots on things that would otherwise be shady. For example, Google 'scrapes' the entire web, but no one would consider that unethical, its a search engine. On the other hand, if they just spammed/exposed all your personal email contacts (google buzz) that is highly likely to be perceived as unethical. At the end of the day, be clever rather than be scammer.
- jerf 16y agoFun thought experiment: Suppose the web didn't have any search engines, but somehow grew to its current size. Now suppose someone proposes starting one up. Exactly how large is the resulting firestorm?
- neilk 16y agoI'm tempted to say that your hypothetical is either impossible, or it's already happened. On the "impossible" side -- search engines, or search directories, pre-date the web. A lot of people downloaded their first web client from a Gopher link or by looking it up on Archie. HTML itself was kind of about providing an index for other files -- "index.html", get it? However, on the "already happened" front, in 1997 Ticketmaster sued Microsoft just for linking to content on its website. And ever since automated search engines have been around, people have been suing them -- for replicating portions of their content without explicit permission, for instance.
- zumda 16y agoTwo possible outcomes: 1. Newspapers would be really upset about the leeching of their bandwidth and would cry around that this is "copyright infringement". Also the RIAA and other such organisations would show that you could search for torrents on them and would try to shut them down. 2. Newspapers and others would see the use of such a thing and would let them do their thing. I think it would be number one.
- grandalf 16y agoScott Kliger, the founder of free411.com defrauded a company I used to work with and our investors of $50K by agreeing to develop some technology for us and then trying to pass off open source code as the deliverable. Meanwhile, he used the funds to build free411.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoLibel suit in .. 3 .. 2 .. 1 ..
- grandalf 16y agoI don't think he'd dispute it. He gave the money back eventually, but after he'd developed his product and obtained investor funding for it. Unfortunately our project lost a fair bit of traction and our investors lost confidence.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- 321speak 16y agoYou sound like you might have done all these things, half of these wouldn't even occur to me?
- spooneybarger 16y agothese are all really common amongst the affiliate marketers. and it is just the tip of the iceberg. affiliate marketing is filled with some seriously sleazy people who do far worse.
- omarchowdhury 16y agoI believe the tactics used by affiliate marketers to gain money in the short term, is having a negative effect on consumer confidence in web transactions in the long term.
- prograndma 16y agoI rather called 'unethical' in loosely startup term as 'creative exploratory of abundance wealth of opportunity'
- nphase 16y ago- putting up an order page when your site wasn't ready - promising unrealistic delivery dates Wait, these are unethical? I thought they were standard and common sales tactics. Seems like many companies are doing that. (disclaimer: I don't sell anything).
- ora600 16y agoSimilar to promising potential customers that your product is doing things it doesn't actually do and hoping you can add the extra features before anyone finds out. I view those as distasteful, but I've yet to see any company/salesperson who doesn't do it. I'm sure this looks different once you are in sales and everyone is doing it, but from my seat over at operations it sure looks dishonest. I hate it when vendors use these tactics on me - so how can I do this to anyone else?
- Confusion 16y agoand hoping you can add the extra features Well, there's a difference between 'hoping' and I'm sure we can get this done. As an example: our product is evolving with the needs of our customers and as such we often promise things that don't exist yet. That doesn't mean we don't have every intention of delivering on our promise.
- ora600 16y agoI guess the question is - does the customer know they don't exist yet but you have every intention of delivering?
- noodle 16y agoits unethical to promise something that you know for a fact you can't deliver. so, its unethical to allow someone to pay for a product that you don't have yet and similar.
- JangoSteve 16y agoI can't think of anything, so either I haven't done anything unethical, or I did a damn good job of convinving myself it was ethical.
- thenduks 16y agoThat's the best thing about ethics, if you convinced yourself it was ethical then it was ethical for you. For someone else maybe, maybe not. Everyone gets their own, entirely personally prioritized set :)
- jiganti 16y agoI think that's defined as egoism; ethics tend to be concerned with the theoretical value of morality.
- thenduks 16y agoI see what you're saying and I don't pretend to be an expert (or even very knowledgeable in general) on the subject. All I meant was that ethics are a very personal thing and what's 'right' to one person may not (and, if you ask me, should not necessarily) be right to another. Ethical egoism says that you should do what is in your self interest, and that doing so makes you ethical... Rather than that I'm trying to ask: What is 'good' or 'bad'? Different cultures, races, sexes and individuals have (at least) slightly varying opinions on what is right and wrong.
- philwelch 16y agoPG: "A lot of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had to resort to in the early days..." http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
- gyardley 16y agoIt's hard to stay more ethical than your competition - tactics that would never occur to you become pretty tempting when you see them successfully used against your own company. That said, for every startup that did something a little shady to succeed, there's got to be another that went off the rails because it spent too much time focused on and fighting with its competition. Ninety-nine percent of my own 'competitor-focused' activity could've been much better spent on my own business.
- stcredzero 16y agoNo, but I lied about it just now. (This is a convoluted bit of self-referential logic and a joke.) Seriously -- a demo where I was logged into a server and monkeypatching the DB locks because they were broken for the piece of the site the marketing/sales guys wanted to show.
- joshu 16y agoI saw a lot of sites spam the bejeezus out of delicious when they got their starts; folks who claim to be reputable now.
- rodh257 16y agoI wonder what the ethics of 'flattering spam' are a la the comments on this blog post http://www.cynotwhynot.com/blog/post/MSBuild-missing-MicrosoftWebApplicationtargets.aspx http://www.cynotwhynot.com/blog/post/MSBuild-missing-Microso... On one hand its spam, but on the other the author can pretend it was a nice comment from an online handbag store owner.
- danbmil99 16y ago"promising unrealistic delivery dates" seems like something few of us could plausibly claim not to have done. Perhaps the question should be "promise dates you know for sure you cannot deliver on".
- notme123 16y agoA super early startup I worked for years ago got a really amazing deal on our first two servers. We paid like some minimal price for some PC hardware that was essentially out of the back of a van.
- code_duck 16y agoOne, and I didn't know it was wrong at the time. So no! I really hate how Facebook works the spam/address book angle. It is very unethical. I don't trust facebook in the slightest.
- ghempton 16y agoThis sounds like a todo list for a non-technical co-founder.
- inovica 16y agoRichard Branson admitted to doing something unethical and illegal in his early days - he was caught by the authorities and he has said that it was a real big lesson for him. I think sometimes the path to 'easy money' can be tempting
- paolomaffei 16y agoI won't talk about me, but I've seen some friends doing shady things. Let's just say I had to convince a friend of mine (for his startup) that DDoSing his competitor at peak times wasn't a wise idea... Another guy I knew (not really a friend) was using xrumer (a tool to spam forums for SEO purposes) directly on his website...
- macca321 16y agosomeone I know paid Philippine girls to reply to messages on his fledgeling dating site.