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How I targeted the Reddit CEO with Facebook ads to get an interview at Reddit
- fluxic 8y agoI did this with the CEO of Breather. Back then, you could target based off of employer, job description, school, and interests. You could also make these target options mutually exclusive—which, in the case of Breather CEO Julien Smith—meant an audience of 1. My unlisted Medium post got 1 read. Felt like a damn king when it worked. Cost me (I shit you not) 20 cents to pull off. Epilogue: I quoted him too high, and didn't get the job. Oh well. Still one of my best stunts ;)
- BurningFrog 8y ago20 cents? That's cheaper than a stamp!
- mslate 8y agoAnd you get read receipts!
- schoen 8y agoI feel like Chris Soghoian (or maybe Ashkan Soltani) also did this in the same timeframe with Google executives when he wanted to lobby them individually about policy issues—but I didn't immediately find a reference to it. (But I think it was the same method, like targeting attorneys at Google who had a certain combination of almae matres.)
- Abhishek41783 8y agoCould you share the Link to your medium post please :)
- DisruptiveDave 8y agoI simply sent him a well-worded cold email. Worked well enough for a response and a discussion. (Nothing came of it for me, either.)
- guessmyname 8y ago> My first thought was email. I can just email him! But that’s boring. > What about getting my article to the top of Hacker News? > The problem is, I didn’t think my article would be interesting enough to a large crowd to make it to the top of HN. Ha! He not only played Reddit's CEO with a Facebook ad… He also got his blog post into the HN top-ten (today). Well done my friend, well done.
- atomical 8y agoCan't you buy upvotes? Bunch of accounts running with a script through Tor?
- ryanx435 8y agoNot sure why you are being downvoted. Yes, you can buy upvotes on Reddit. It's about 5 bucks for a couple hundred, often more than enough to get to the front page of mid sized subreddit.
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- lerie82 8y agoso he didn't get the job, how do we even know this is true at all? smells like fake news. plus, a blog on tumblr?
- verroq 8y agoHow I wrote a content free article to get upvotes on HN.
- dang 8y agoIt's a small story but there's content there. Please don't post mean or unsubstantive comments!
- slow_donkey 8y agoReminds me of this story: http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/ http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-... Might have to try myself someday
- FuckOffNeemo 8y agoWhat an excellent read :)
- greenhatman 8y agoThat is hilarious. I wish I could do that. Too bad all my friends use adblock.
- rrggrr 8y agoThis doesn't work anymore. All the ad platforms now require thousand(s) of users in a targeted audience.
- gwern 8y agoJust makes it more expensive! How much would you pay for your dream job or a new lead? A few hundred or thousand dollars would be chump change to a lot of people.
- bawana 8y agomy ignorance and naivete are really annoying me. How do you write an ad to 'target' a person? How do you personalize spam??
- citrablue 8y agoIf you have an infinite budget, I could 'target' you by purchasing every ad on the internet with the copy "hi bawana, click this link!" Nearly every impression would be seen by the wrong person, but a few of the impressions would be seen by you. The rest of the exercise is figuring out how to segment the audience based on whether it's likely/unlikely that you're in the segment. If I know you're from the US and live in California, I can geo-target to that region.
- propogandist 8y agomodem ad technology can do it... your mastercard and visa purchase behavior, for example, is available for purchase. That data can be merged with other purchased data, and things like aggregated browsing behavior. This is all done to serve people who may be in my target audience with (semi) personalized ads. The ad may not appeal to you, so it gets classified as spam.
- rando444 8y agoThere was an article on HN of a writeup from someone that pulled this off recently. I think the post was probably someone in the neighborhood of 4-6 months ago. I don't recall the company or the person that was targeted though.
- rotred 8y agoI'm surprised this worked. I would have assumed he had adblock of some sort.
- mrep 8y agoMobile apps and some mobile browsers don't support ad block. While I have ublock on my laptop, i still get ads when I am on my phone which ironically is where these companies get most of their revenue these days.
- kmin93 8y agoIf you have a Raspberry Pi, look into using Pi-hole[1]. It provides network-wide blocking when installed on your home network by proxying requests. I also use AdGuard Pro[2], which provides a similar function when I'm outside my home network. Both happen to be open source software[3][4], so that's a plus. [1]: https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ [2]: https://adguard.com/en/adguard-ios-pro/overview.html https://adguard.com/en/adguard-ios-pro/overview.html [3]: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole [4]: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS
- rdiddly 8y agoSo 2 years later and he's not with Reddit anymore. Are we not supposed to ask about that part? Sounds like this wasn't exactly a success story.
- diminoten 8y agoIt's possible he did what he wanted to do there and had decided to move on!
- phillco 8y agoWell, we don't know if he got the job :)
- dumbfounder 8y agoI didn't end up working for Reddit. I wanted the head of search position that was open, but they thought I didn't have enough experience. We talked about an IC role, but I would have had to move to the SF area (I live in DC) as they didn't allow remote employees. I couldn't justify uprooting my family (wife and 3 little kids) to move to a more expensive part of the country for less money than I can make in DC, even with the promising stock options. It was a hard decision. Still don't know if it was right one. (For the sake of full disclosure, I was never extended an offer, we decided to break talks prior to that stage based on the salary/location discussions)
- justAnotherNET 8y agoThat’s too bad, it seems in your absence Reddit never filled the position
- rdiddly 8y agoWell you got their attention, anyway. And short-circuited what is, at most companies, a pretty soul-crushing process!
- 0xfeba 8y agoHow many years have you been at this? How do/did you learn the more architectural problem solving skills? I ask because I am pretty skilled technically, but only down in the weeds. Reading your blog post about the two techniques and how to combine them, I can understand, but I would not come up with this myself.
- Abhishek41783 8y agoReminds me of this article where Brian Swichkow pranks his roommate with targeted ads that are hilarious http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/ http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...
- jypepin 8y agoah that was a great read, thanks for sharing!
- eertami 8y agoIs it just me or do conversations he posted between him and his roommate seem a little off... They just don't read like any natural conversation I've ever had or have seen, and I'm not sure people naturally talk like that.
- jgtrosh 8y agoThe roommate uses old-school double spaces after full stops, they just might care a lot about their online appearance.
- Abhishek41783 8y agoThe subtlety of a normal conversation might have been lost due to the writer's poor writing skills. This is just a speculation though as I have faced similar problems in jotting down my views.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoSeems unfair to deny the prank when the roommate straight accused him.
- rococode 8y agoAlso reminds me of this article by Jack Smith (Vungle co-founder) where he used LinkedIn to do something similar: https://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000 https://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000
- gst 8y agoSomewhat related: Since a few weeks I'm regularly getting a Facebook ad with the title "I want to work at [company name]. Can you help?" from someone who seems to be interested in a job at the company at which I'm working. Anyone else who noticed similar ads?
- slackoverflower 8y agoThere have been a good few of stories of people trying to get jobs, internships, client meetings with clever hack like this. I don't why this hit the front page. Related to your story, it's either this person really wants to work for your company or you're part of a huge bigger list of employees whose company the person wants to work for. So the person might have just lumped your company with the others in the ad targeting set up.
- zaheerbaloch 8y agoThis is savage :)
- chrisweekly 8y agoReminds me of a clever approach a former colleague used to land a job, connecting famous / high-profile people: http://katelynfriedson.com/post/70127031536/how-i-used-customer-development-to-snag-an http://katelynfriedson.com/post/70127031536/how-i-used-custo...
- dm7 8y agoReminds me of S4E8 Breaking Bad when Gus tricks Don Eladio into a meeting.
- itronitron 8y agoso it's just a matter of time before someone proposes to their girlfriend with a targeted Facebook ad :(
- evanmoran 8y agoToo late :) http://www.justmediadesign.com.au/experiments/facebook-ad-proposal/ http://www.justmediadesign.com.au/experiments/facebook-ad-pr...
- rvalue 8y agoI am surprised that Reddit CEO does not use adblockers.
- DonHopkins 8y agoI wonder how many ads Fox News has sold to people who want to reach a certain audience of one. At least one! https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-oliver-donald-trump-iran-deal_us_5add7d00e4b075b631e7346b https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-oliver-donald-trum...
- rusanu 8y agoThe cost should also account for the work put in and the years of experience and know how to pull it off. It cost you $10, but it would cost me several hundreds or even thousands to pay experts to do it for me.
- abvdasker 8y agoClassic HN comment: criticize someone else's cool idea to make one's self feel better about not having that idea.
- tmh88j 8y agoHow is that relevant? When calculating my home's value should I add the cost of my college tuition? I wouldn't have my job without my degree, and I wouldn't have my house without my job.
- oselhn 8y agoThe same trick was used to convinced Putin to go for olympic games in Sochi. Except they used ad in radio programme [1]. [1] All the Kremlin's Men by Mikhail Zygar
- unusximmortalis 8y agoWhy you stayed only 2 years there?
- unusximmortalis 8y agoAnswer is below/above. He did not accept the position offered.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jwilk 8y agoCopy of the article that works with JS disabled: https://gist.github.com/jwilk/3f0d80740f72c5ac0e2a4ae8790b9aa1 https://gist.github.com/jwilk/3f0d80740f72c5ac0e2a4ae8790b9a...
- jhoh 8y agoThanks. I couldn't get past the "Update to our privacy policy" thing even with JS enabled.
- leoplct 8y agoCan you show us the Facebook Ad placement and the article you sponsored? Would be very interesting
- jaksmit 8y agoHere’s how i did something similar a few years ago, using Linkedin ads: https://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000 https://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000
- mathewsanders 8y ago> [Hacker News] is an amazing community, built off an early version of Reddit, and run by Y-Combinator (which incubated Reddit way back when) I just scanned wikipedia, first version of reddit was from 2005, and first version of hacker news was 2007. I always thought PG wrote the code for Hacker News, does that imply that PG helped write the first (Lisp) version of reddit before Aaron Swartz rewrote reddit in Python?
- deviationblue 8y agoCynical me all the while thinking this is an ad for Facebook.