Marketing sometimes means CHEATING

Marketing sometimes means CHEATING Abusing loopholes in the systems for some might be controversial For others, they are prime examples of resourcefulness - as long as you don't hurt anyone Let's see how WhatsApp, Reddit, Amazon, Paypal, and Airbnb cheated on their way up: 1. WhatsApp Koum and Acton took the advantage of an early App Store bug The “What's New” list saw WhatsApp as a “new” app whenever the creators changed its name on AppStore They kept changing it, and it gave them the first 1,000 users because WhatsApp stayed at the top of the “What's New” list until Apple fixed that bug. 2. Reddit Steve and Alexis struggled with getting their first users To solve that they created fake accounts and started faking traffic by posting links Reddit had no subreddits until real users began coming in The fake accounts got phased out over time 3. Amazon Jeff came up with the name “Amazon” because website listings like Yahoo (which was THE INTERNET portal at the time) were organized alphabetically At first, he thought about “Cadabra” but a name with “A” would pop up earlier on the list Other than that, when the team needed to stock, they ordered books from other stores, like Baker & Taylor Jeff and his team, had one problem. The minimal number of books in one order was 10 It was too expensive They found a workaround. They always ordered the book they wanted + 9 copies of a book about lichens that was constantly out of stock.The store would send that particular book and a note saying sorry for not sending the 9 books about lichens 4. Paypal When PayPal appeared on eBay, the team made bots Their targeted eBay Power Sellers – the top 20k merchants on the platform The bots were buying stuff there and insisted on paying via PayPal eBay sellers got interested in the service because it looked like there was an increasing demand for it This marketing stunt turned into a 33% market share after just 3 months! 5. Airbnb Airbnb created a bot that looked for room-renting offers on Craigslist, and then sent them emails It asked them to include AirBed&Breakfast (MVP version of Airbnb) in their posts When they got short on money, they released Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's cereals during the 2008 elections They got featured on CNN Within a week Obama O's & Cap’n McCain's sold $30k worth of cereals - almost 4 times what the Airbnb core business had made before this moment 6. LinkedIn In 2004 LinkedIn created a new feature - aggressive contact importing with the use of email lists. The platform browsed through users’ contacts and sent invitations. The team has even built an Outlook plugin for that. Networking got much easier. Later on, LinkedIn exploited the feature to the maximum. When it got access to your email contacts list, it spammed everyone in it, multiple times. They got even sued for that.