A LinkedIn Hack That Led to a $120k Investment

http://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000

by samp615 • 11 years ago

248 89 11 years ago

dsugarman• 11 years ago

Really cool trick. The title is misleading, it lead to $120k in investment for his company, it did not 'make him 120k'. Also it seems strange that Thomas was

inundated with emails from his friends telling him to check out our landing page.

when later we learn only 5 people viewed the ad and 2 people clicked. Either way, cool story, the details really do get to me.

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

@dsugarman: to clarify: that was just one of the ad-campaigns targeting Thomas specifically. There were a number of other campaigns targeting his investors etc

kzhahou• 11 years ago

Even the article title is a hustle! :-)

The takeaway of all this: always push, always aggressive.

theseatoms• 11 years ago

The title is misleading, it lead to $120k in investment for his company, it did not 'make him 120k'.

That's an important distinction. I was wondering what I was missing.

paulpauper2• 11 years ago

yeah..and that's why verbal scores are lower than math ones lol

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

RE "The title is misleading, it lead to $120k in investment for his company, it did not 'make him 120k'"

I agree, semantically it's not a very accurate title. But actually, I'd say that in the long-run the chain of events that resulted from this hack (i.e. me moving to America and then my startup getting funded etc) has led to me personally benefiting much more than $120k. Essentially it was the main cause to making me millions of dollars. The $120k was just the most quantifiable from the initial hack.

bbcbasic• 11 years ago

The title is a hack. They are hustling for your attention.

paulpauper2• 11 years ago

I initially thought it was a bug bounty

dang2• 11 years ago

We changed the title to be less misleading.

samp6154• 11 years ago

You can change people's submissions? Hmmm. That seems a bit strange.

forrestthewoods• 11 years ago

People could e-mail Thomas without clicking the link.

misiti37802• 11 years ago

I wonder how they came up with 7 as the minimum number required to target?

maaarghk• 11 years ago

Perhaps there is an xkcd for that. https://xkcd.com/221/

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

I don't know. I was very shocked! perhaps it was just human error, or no one had actually gone through this process before to bother to find out?

misiti37802• 11 years ago

downvoted - really ?

dsp1234• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, the ambiguity of the English language strikes again.

If by "they", you meant the article writer, then the reasons for the downvotes are likely because the article writer explained how that number was achieved.

If by "they", you meant LinkedIn, then the downvotes are likely because people thought you meant the article writer.

This is just a case where the pronoun just doesn't give enough information to keep people from being confused.

Phr34Ck2• 11 years ago

the title is hilarious. It got you traffic, good for you. The article itself is nothing but a bag of SEO? words.

samp6154• 11 years ago

What words would it possibly be trying to rank for? Stop being a hater.

markcerqueira• 11 years ago

Not OP, but the title seems to imply the author hacked LinkedIn and got 120k out of it. Whereas the author simply figured out how specific he could use LinkedIn's ad targeting to impress someone who was giving out 120k.

Title is definitely a bit misleading, but at the end of the day, you gotta do what you gotta do to get the clicks.

aresant• 11 years ago

The best part about this 3-year old hack is that it's still working, on us this time :)

The story starts in 2012 when it was a "Adwords hack" ->

https://pando.com/2012/05/02/vungles-co-founders-hustle-thei...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/06/25/dont-try-t...

And the wheelworks started again in April of this year ->

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-linkedin-hack-that-turned...

I am writing the above with respect - I do the exact same thing, re-use and re-cycle great content as often as you can, it's a might harder to create the story than to perpetuate it and market it.

The basics are covered brilliantly in PG's "The Submarine" if you haven't seen it http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

yeah, it's been written about before, but I wanted to clarify the exact steps that I took, as the previous articles have been a bit hazy. Per the Pando article "Using a handful of techniques that he still seems to shy away from talking about" and as you highlight, an "adwords hack" is a very bad description.

I haven't read that article from PG, I'll definitely check it out!

quadrature3• 11 years ago

Im really surprised this still works with the ubiquitous use of ad block in the tech circle.

austenallred• 11 years ago

Ad block isn't quite as ubiquitous as HN seems to think it is

Zarathustra30• 11 years ago

If I like a site enough, I turn ad block off.

If the ads aren't annoying, I leave ad block off.

rwhitman• 11 years ago

Adblock and any other plugin that manipulates the DOM interferes with web frontend work, also marketing work.

impish19• 11 years ago

TLDR: This guy used LinkedIn's targeted ads to target an investor and 6 of his friends to get their attention, leading to a $120k investment.

Side-note: Similar and just as amusing story, but with FB ads - http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

yeah that's a cool article as well. I liked his similar approach.

brianpetro_• 11 years ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

PascLeRasc2• 11 years ago

I have a LinkedIn with ~50 connections, but I know of no one who uses it for anything other than an online resume. People i know might go on once every two weeks, if that. It's strange to me that someone would be active enough on here to notice an ad like this. Whose experience is abnormal here?

eropple• 11 years ago

Are people trying to get in touch with you regularly for business purposes? On the flip side, are you trying to get in touch with them?

My LinkedIn is pretty invaluable for scoping out potential clients and making an initial approach. I don't usually try to use InMails, but I'll figure out the right person to talk to and make an email approach with that information.

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

I think that it was especially relevant in this case as the guy running the incubator was on LinkedIn checking the profiles of all the people that were applying.

scoggs• 11 years ago

That was the entire reason I figured the guy was a good target for the LinkedIn ad. Excellent strategy -- even those who dislike LinkedIn have to be active on it to sift through 150+ resumes.

I imagine the candidates were sorted digitally at multiple points to narrow things down and share among those hiring. During the arduous process the weary workers take their glance away from the screen to relax for a second only to notice their company's name -- or bosses face in an odd place on the web page they now have memorized from screen burn-in and that's precisely when this ad is almost (IMO not almost) guaranteed.

samp6154• 11 years ago

Are you an engineer? Most of my programmer buds rarely use LinkedIn. However, I'm a business guy and use it at least once a day.

PascLeRasc2• 11 years ago

EE student, but I'm drawing from a broad range of STEM students and working engineers/neuroscientists/software engineers.

mandeepj• 11 years ago

You are forgetting about the pressure from investor's friends to check out the candidate's profile. This is what caused this hack to be a success.

jpindar• 11 years ago

Some of their discussion groups are excellent if you can overlook the spam and the clueless students (and even some of those turn into worthwhile or at least humorous discussions). I get email notifications of posts in several embedded systems groups and check them every few days, more often if there's a good ongoing thread.

mendelk• 11 years ago

LinkedIn provides some of the most detailed targeting options of any ad-platform I’ve ever seen (though I’d say that Facebook has now eclipsed it)

Someone did something similar using FB to prank their friend:

http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...

HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

yep, his was a funny 'hack'

mpeg• 11 years ago

Here's a free idea to b2b startups: before you go into a sales meeting with someone, spend some pocket money putting your ad in front of them via linkedin / facebook.

They'll likely attribute it to "frequency illusion" and you'll gain a much higher profile in their eyes.

Then close it. :)

yumraj2• 11 years ago

Well, here's a better idea : create a service which let's me do that easily.

odonnellryan• 11 years ago

Extreme ad micro-targeting as a service? Sounds awesome.

mooreds• 11 years ago

Can't you do that already with LinkedIn (and a bit of research)?

Not sure what the service would provide on top of that. Can you elucidate further?

ashworth• 11 years ago

Sounds like demandbase. They have IP lists of many big companies and serve ads targeted by company, part of a field called account based marketing. My manager used them at her previous company.

lifeisstillgood• 11 years ago

The beautiful thing about this hack is it subverts the modern consumers expectation about how advertising works. We have an assumption it is a broadcast medium - and that has changed radically, and totally.

This hack will continue to work for as long as we fool ourselves as to the new nature of the world

aclimatt• 11 years ago

A nitpick that is somewhat related to the thesis, but I think still relevant: I dislike how success in this context is completely centered around raising money, and nothing to do with actually running a profitable company and delivering value.

The main point of the article was to run a LinkedIn ad to get accepted into AngelPad and raise money, and that's totally fair (and commendable!).

But sprinkled throughout the article, there are quotes like:

I've co-founded two startups that have raised ~$90 million in venture capital (Shyp and Vungle) and have created hundreds of jobs in five different countries.
Vungle has grown to hundreds of employees and over $25 million in funding.

Is that really the metric of success we're going for? Give anybody $90 million and they can pretty trivially create hundreds of jobs.

I don't know what Vungle's revenue is, but if we're not in a bubble yet, raising a bunch of money, leaving the company, and touting it "hustling" isn't helping.

EDIT: I'd like to clarify briefly that I'm not downplaying raising money. Going out and fundraising is really hard (I've done it), but so aren't dozens of other tasks at a company.

+1 to anybody who is able to successfully bring in funding, but I've met too many people who have felt like their company has "made it" once they've raised money -- when in fact that's just the beginning.

akiselev• 11 years ago

Raising money is "just the beginning" for a company but for many people, including most founders and early employees who raise the funding, it's really the beginning of the end.

With funding comes outside pressure from investors that seeps into and permeates the entire venture. The pressure to show rapid growth, alone, changes what kind of people get hired, how their responsibilities are structured, and how they interact with the pre-funding team. Founders will be pushed out or replaced by career executives from the industry, early employees will be managed out or grow bored with the monotony of an established business, and anyone involved in raising the initial rounds will likely be way out of their depth by the time growth stage funding rolls around.

Let's face it, we monkeys like shiny trophies for well quantified metrics to put on our wall and taking credit for a bunch of zeroes on a check is a lot more practical than for the sum of all of the work and value added by a company that survives for years or decades after you leave it.

ksk• 11 years ago

That is a stereotype, and a rather crude caricature of what happens after funding. Anyway, that seems to be your opinion, but out of curiosity how many companies have you personally witnessed this happen in?

samp6154• 11 years ago

I have heard that Vungle is doing well financially, so I'd say that's success.

I don't know about Shyp tho, but they have a lot of buzz and an innovative product, which in my mind is a success...although they still have a LONG way to go to prove themselves. So I get your point. I don't think funding is defines success, but more so a strong sign that your on your way making something work. And I totally agree...funding in itself isn't something you should brag about.

However, the # of jobs Jack helped create IMHO is 100% a success. It's super rewarding and changes lives (most of the time) in a great way.

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

I agree that we shouldn't celebrate raising money. Unfortunately that is just a standout metric that many companies are still judged on and was added at the start of the article to give some credibility.

it wouldn't have been as catchy if the title was "here's a tactic that helped me start a company that became profitable and delivering value" ;)

bmir-alum-007• 11 years ago

Quite the opposite. It should be a badge of honor to do more with least funding, waste, capital, effort, etc. as possible. I'm convinced at this point that too much funding, especially to inexperienced ops scaling-hat wearing founders, is far, far more destructive than the focused struggle of slightly underfunded, hungry shops that are focused on delivering and not on the tired mythology of funding == success == exit.

OTOH, the campaign to get the last slot cost him only $0.01.

PS: Don't buy a Ferrari if you get funded, it's wiser to milk the poverty appearance card for all it's worth. (I know a guy that recent sold his startup to EMC for 8 digits that ran around with 3 missing hubcaps.)

http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

SZJX• 11 years ago

Exactly. Quotes like:

The word “hustle” has lost its meaning. Everyone who works hard is called a “hustler,” even if they don’t win. Fuck conceptualization of ‘hustling’ as working hard. I only care about results. A great hustle without results isn’t a great hustle. With this hustle, my goal was to get the attention of the AngelPad founder.

are just downright blatant and uncomfortable. If everybody thinks in this way then we're doomed. Unfortunately nowadays many do seem to do so.

Rogerh91• 11 years ago

New extension to this idea: retarget people who visit your landing page. Frequency effect loop.

giech• 11 years ago

On a more serious note, targeted ads when implemented incorrectly can lead to privacy violations by leaking information about the viewer of the ad: http://theory.stanford.edu/~korolova/Privacy_violations_usin...

GCA10• 11 years ago

Lovely beginning, but the narrative suddenly goes dark 3 paragraphs from the end, with the line: "Whilst I'm no longer at the company ..."

So what happened!?!? I'd love to believe that anyone with such a clever hack could get some mileage out of whatever came next. Alas, it sounds as if this is the classic Cinderella story with only mice and pumpkins at the end. Darn! A follow-up post with the rest of the story would be very welcome.

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

fair point. I mainly wanted to focus here on the aftermath of the linkedin campaign.

The sequence of events basically was: - Thursday saw the TC post, same day created Linkedin ad campaign - Friday got a call from Thomas - next week we got the final spot (on about a Thursday) - about 3 days later we were on a flight to san francisco to join Angelpad (+ $120k at this point) - about 10 weeks after moving to San Francisco we started raising our seed round. We ended up raising ~$2 mil led by Google Ventures - about a year later raised $6.5mil Series A - about a year after that raised $17m Series B - after that the company kept growing and has opened offices in various countries etc

for myself personally, I moved more towards advising a few different startups.

zachmachuca2• 11 years ago

What was your role during growth? From the outside peeking in it sounds like you were possibly pushed out. Nothing wrong with that, as you have accomplished so much regardless.

downandout• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, now this method will be flooded, and everyone of note in SV will be inundated with similar ads. But it is an interesting case study in how to be creative and think outside the box.

Facebook recently paid me a bounty for pointing out a problem that enabled this type of pinpoint targeting accuracy on their ad platform despite a policy that greatly limited it. It's interesting that LinkedIn doesn't consider it a privacy problem. I noticed that you could create custom audiences for ads by simply using anyone's FB vanity URL and appending @facebook.com to target by email. So if the vanity url of the target was facebook.com/mark, then you could target an ad to that person by simply adding mark@facebook.com to a custom audience list. They have now fixed it, but this same thing the author did here could have also been done on FB until about 2 months ago (and can still be done, but now you need their actual email address to target them).

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

I found this exploit a while back; when I checked more recently, the minimum number of people that you need to target in order for an ad to be accepted is closer to 1000. So it's harder to replicate.

similarly, with the facebook thing. I saw that Facebook is rolling back usage of the facebook.com email addresses, so I'm not sure how long that will keep working.

the_watcher• 11 years ago

I wish I'd known this back when I was actually running Facebook ads. I'm glad it was pointed out to them, but would have been great to know as I worked at an early large-scale FB advertiser.

dreamfactory2• 11 years ago

I'm not getting how this is a hack and any different to just using LI's targeted ads as they are intended. Last time I checked the minimum was 1000 people.

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

yep. They recently changed it to 1000. At the time, I found out that for whatever reason the minimum number was 7.

I'm pretty sure LinkedIn ads weren't intended to have a picture of the guy's face who you're targeting as the ad though!

atorralb• 11 years ago

alot of 12's in that article

orliesaurus• 11 years ago

Its like this guy who was looking for a date using Adwords and Facebook ads! ha good read thanks for sharing

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

do you have a link to that? it sounds vaguely familiar. I know the guy that did a prank on his roommate using Facebook ads.

spyder• 11 years ago

Smart, but are you legally allowed to use people's photo in ads without their permission? (Not a big issue in this case and probably it would have worked even without the photo, but I'm curious.)

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

I'm not sure if it's 'legally' allowed. It's almost definitely against LinkedIn's terms of service I'd imagine though!

I'd think that with anything like this; if it were illegal, then likely the individual themselves would have to sue me. Hopefully they wouldn't want to take it that far once I explained to them that I was just targeting them and trying to get their attention etc. Certainly for Thomas, Vungle turned out to be quite a good investment thus far and a nice story, so I hope he wont sue me ;)

will_brown2• 11 years ago

Jaksmit if you are still around responding I am curious...if only 2 people clicked your ad including the target himself, then how is it the very next day after the ad was created the target was "inundated with emails from his friends telling him to check out our landing page"?

WalterGR• 11 years ago

And if he targeted the ad to exactly 7 people, how did enough of Angelpad's founder's friends see it to inundate him with email?

pbnjay• 11 years ago

I assume he made a bunch of variations, this was just one of them. That way he could get placement in every spot on the page.

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

@will_brown + @WalterGR sorry that it was unclear. This was one ad-campaign targeting just Thomas (+ 6 randomers). I ran a number of other variations targeting investors that were connected to him and others in his network. These still didn't target too many people (I'd say <100); but still got a lot of attention.

I'm also guessing that some people might have just told him they'd seen his face on a LinkedIn ad. Not necessarily clicked through to it.

will_brown2• 11 years ago

Thanks, I misunderstood and thought you created 2 campaigns and only the one recieved click throughs. Anyway the epitome of working smart and not hard...although I am sure you're doing plenty of both.

ygol• 11 years ago

cool

woof• 11 years ago

Using something as intended is now a "hack"? (Get off my lawn!)

And wouldn't this have worked just as well if he had targeted all employees of AngelPad? The CPM would still be pretty low...

jaksmit18• 11 years ago

@woof : I'm pretty sure that running ads with the person's face who you want to target isn't how linkedin intended their ad-system to be used!

kkt262• 11 years ago

Love this article. It's always great to think outside the box, and the author of this article definitely did that.

A LinkedIn Hack That Led to a $120k Investment

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