Ask HN: What are some black arts used by founders?

Re:Ask HN: What are some black arts used by founders? by muzani on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @02:51AM (#28770004)

Set aside a marketing budget, and then basically sell the $10 item at $9, justifying that the $1 difference is marketing.

Have a marketplace. Buy $100 of goods from users selling stuff. The $100 is a marketing expense. Add $100 to GMV.

Have 5k users on Android, 3k on iPhone, 8k on web. Add them up to show the product has 16k users.

Raise money from an angel who owns a conglomerate. The angel forces all his businesses and people working in these businesses to adopt the app that others wouldn't otherwise trust. Use these totally legitimate clients to create glowing testimonials.

As an early stage investor, instead of putting a lump sum into the account, create a dummy company (or several) for the purpose of feeding cash into the startup. When you're raising money, just sign off half a million dollars of consulting fees to show that the startup is making money.

Create a review site targeting the users. Write a glowing review about how amazing this app is. Share it to gullible Facebook groups.

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Re:Ask HN: What are some black arts used by founders? by ecf on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @05:13PM (#28778497)

> Raise money from an angel who owns a conglomerate. The angel forces all his businesses and people working in these businesses to adopt the app that others wouldn't otherwise trust.

In other words, the YC model.

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Re:Ask HN: What are some black arts used by founders? by computator on Thursday October 07, 2021 @12:04AM (#28781709)

> Have 5k users on Android, 3k on iPhone, 8k on web. Add them up to show the product has 16k users.

If it's a traditional desktop program like Word or Excel, I think it's perfectly fine to add up users from different platforms (which often even require a separate purchase). If it's something like Skype or Netflix, I can see how there might be some overlap -- the same person might use it from their iPhone one day and from the web on a different day. Is that what you mean?

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Re:Ask HN: What are some black arts used by founders? by muzani on Thursday October 07, 2021 @03:39AM (#28783329)

As with all the other examples, there's some legit situations and some less honest situations.

The word hustle describes this activity well: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hustle

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Re:Ask HN: What are some black arts used by founders? by notabanker on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @07:02AM (#28771587)

Now I'm glad I started this Ask HN as your response is eye opening. You should write a blogpost about it.

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Re:Ask HN: What are some black arts used by founders? by muzani on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @10:21AM (#28773516)

That's interesting. I thought this was something everyone has experienced, to the point that it's possibly a Dilbert strip somewhere.

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