The fallacy comes from forgetting these are people. “Surely theres 1 in 10,000 who want this” is wishful thinking, “There exists a type of person who wants this, and I can point to them, but they happen to be a small segment of the population - 1 in 10,000” is actionable and valid.

There’s nearly 8,000,000,000 humans, so there’s a ton of variety that one can’t even imagine, but probably none of them want to eat a bar of soap for breakfast each day even if you think there must be some rare 1 in 1,000,000 out there.

Putting 1 in BIG NUMBER is just a way we abstract away hard and intimidating questions.

> The fallacy comes from forgetting these are people.

Perhaps. But at least that's just on paper. Resorting to advertising means actually forgetting your visitors are people.

The "principle" is just multiplication, and yes, if you multiply your number of visitors by a number that you make up, you can get any number you want as a result.

I don’t think that spam is a fair comparison. Spammers send out offer for stuff that people want. It’s completely different than first giving out what people want and then asking for a gratitude payment.

Spam’s success rate would be dictated by the percentage of the people who want the product in the general population after passing through the spam delivery funnel.

With the donations it’s completely different mechanism.

Nevertheless, the fallacy is that small looking number of market share is the smallest possible market share.