"I Don't Want to Be a Spammer, Bro"

Black hat tactics are more legit than you think

When you think of black hat growth strategies you imagine some neckbeard sitting in his (or most likely, his mother’s) basement, spamming the internet with offers for boner pills and payday loans.

You don’t imagine the founders of a $100B publicly-traded company.

AirBnB was built on a foundation of what most Silicon Valley types (the kind of people who brag about what # hire they were at different companies) call growth hacking.

That’s a cute euphemism, but we’re adults here so let’s call it what it is. Spam. Black hat marketing. Doing whatever it takes, et al.

In the early days AirBnB grew their platform by sending out emails to anyone who listed a vacation rental on Craigslist, inviting them to add the listing to AirBnb as well.

Note that the emails always had a female name.

(lesson there)

The founders of AirBnb saw an obvious path to success and took it. Now the company is worth $100 billion.

Yet there’s a 99% chance that you wouldn’t have done the same thing because “I don’t want to be a spammer, bro”.

Your own ego would have prevented you from growing the business and making bank.

Unlike the founders of Reddit, who seeded their brand new social network with tons of fake accounts to get the ball rolling.

Here’s Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman talking about how they did it:

And don’t even get me started on how LinkedIn grew it’s early userbase by abusing user permissions to take over users’ email accounts and spam their contact list.

Obviously that one isn’t legal and they were sued for it. Definitely shouldn’t copy that one. But the mentality is the point.

Want another example?