This blog post was written in 2011, when the book “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” was a best seller. The book was a guide to convincing your boss to let you work from home so you could have more time to build a side hustle business.

One of the main premises of the book was to validate your side hustle with fake Google ads to see how many people clicked on your product. This was a very trendy idea at the time.

I knew several people who tried this trick, and it backfired for most of them. In the real world, customers are very averse to potential scams on the internet. They quickly notice if a company is pretending to be something it’s not, and they remember that the company was misleading for a long, long time.

The modern equivalent is a landing page that captures the user’s email to wait for an invite to the “current private beta”. Making a webpage that pretends to crash on checkout as this blog author suggests, is a terrible way to retain user interest and build confidence in your brand.