By Any Means Necessary
We often hear entrepreneurs say they are going to make it by any means necessary.Many entrepreneurs and e-commerce professionals for example wrestle with questions like should I buy reviews and followers, or should I grow things naturally?You may be surprised to learn about some of the business practices of some of your favorite companies and some of the largest and most popular companies around today and some of the ruthless and questionable business practices they took in their early days.
I remember years ago hearing about the Uber/Lyft debacle where Uber scheduled and cancelled more than 5,000 rides from competitor Lyft. This got me thinking about many of the questionable tactics we hear about companies taking, especially new startups dead set on succeeding.
Many of these companies lied to you, many of these companies spammed you, and many outright sabataged their competitors. A few of these companies even had lawsuits filed against them for this stuff.
Most of these short cuts or growth hacks that these companies did were technically legal, but bordered on unethical. Some worked and some of these companies grew to be worth Billions of Dollars while others lost their users trust and fell off the map into obscurity.
This is my personal spin on this but I feel some of these practices were sketchy as in harmful, distrustful, and something these companies shouldn't be proud of having done while others are more scrappy or hustlers which I would define as achieving a goal with limited resources and not harming anyone while maybe bending the rules as bit. As they say, if you're given a 10 foot wall to get over and a 5 foot ladder you need to get creative.
I would chalk this one up to scrappy and hustling. They didn't really harm anyone. They needed to make their forum have some value for early users, something an empty forum with no content wouldn't do. How do you grow a site when there's nothing for people to come for? Without users the platform is useless. Reddit in this case made a very effective move without harming anyone.
Paypal
Paypal is probably one of the best known if not the best known company in the payments industry. Paypal all but has a monopoly on eBay payments. But before that, in the early days, Paypal created a bot that purchased items on eBay and paid using Paypal. After Paypal became the norm for payments, eBay wound up purchasing them for 1.5 Billion Dollars.This story essentially proves that you can indeed buy your way into business. Though this has nothing to do with SEO, this may be considered somewhat of a "greyhat" method, not blackhat and outright bad but clearly not whitehat either. Overall though we'll call this scrappy as nobody was really harmed.
Tinder
Dating websites are notorious for creating fake accounts to increase user demand. Anyone who's visited any non-mainstream dating site is probably aware that the vast majority of profiles are fake bots. Tinder's first 1,000 users were all bots. Tinder however today is valued at 5 Billion, yes you saw that right 5 Billion Dollars.Like Reddit, in order to make a community work you need others on that marketplace. Though what Reddit did and what Tinder did are very similar, Reddit made fake profiles to throw up content which probably still had some value, where as what Tinder did was decieve their user base, as well as waste their time replying to and answering fake bots. Although technically no rules were broken I would consider this slightly sketchy, and as someone who has used dating sites in the past I would also consider this very annoying.
I think this is the tough thing about starting any type of business or website that revolves around a community whether it's a commerce website, dating website, or even a forum. Nobody will come without other users, but you can't really obtain users without existing users. It's sort of a catch 22 and almost forces companies to do things like this.
AirBNB
AirBNB, the peer to peer housing rental services years ago created a bot that automatically responded to housing posts on their rival Craigslist website. They stole people from Craigslist and converted them into their own users on their own website. This led to much of their early growth. Today AirBNB is valued at around 24 Billion Dollars.Is this sketchy or scrappy? It's a little bit sketchy but pretty much every internet marketer, affiliate marketer, etc comments on other people's blog posts, on other people's Youtube videos, etc. Everyone is trying to steal everyone else's traffic so it's pretty much the norm. Since they didn't really harm or lie to their users we'll say this is cool.
Personally I've never been a huge fan of Facebook and to this day don't maintain a Facebook profile, at least not a realy one, I have a few throw away accounts for marketing purposes. This was somewhat sketchy as this was spam e-mail and they did not have permission to market to these users. No-one likes spam e-mail. That said they took the route of asking for forgiveness and not permission. This was a bit sketchy but ultimately led to their website becomming one of the largest around.
Myspace
Myspace, it's been a while since we heard that name. I used to be an avid Myspace user and though looking back, most people make fun of Myspace, I actually preferred it to Facebook and am somewhat surprised Facebook surpassed it.Similar to Facebook, Myspace had a e-mail database of 100 Million e-mail addresses and spammed them all to announce their launch. As we said above with Facebook, nobody likes spam e-mail so we'll chalk this one up to being a bit sketchy.
Glide Video Texting
Glide is somewhat of a lesser known company but I tend to like to try out new apps when they come out. Glide is a video messenging app. They spam texted users to get them to download their app. They wound up doing one of the things I hate the most, without my permission they texted everyone in my phonebook asking them to download the app and signup. This is sketchy, no doubt about it.Youtube
I love Youtube, it's one of my favorite apps and websites. I love it as a creator and a viewer. In the early days Youtube founders installed a feature which allowed viewers to spam their friends about a video. Youtube in the early days was also known for hosting copyrighted and pirated content. Somewhat sketchy but I have a hard time knocking Youtube as I like it so much.Though they lost 11 Billion of their company value, LinkedIn, is the most established professional social network and boasts over 400 Million users. This is sketchy and apparently against the law as well. The last thing my co-workers wwant is a spam email from me inviting me to join something.
Amazon Sellers
This isn't knocking Amazon, this is more about sellers on Amazon. The fact of the matter is the products which sell the most on Amazon are not necessarily the best products, the sellers, don't necessarily provide the best customer service. It really boils down to who does the best job of doing a product rollout, of garnering reviews, and who can best game the algorithm. This isn't unique to Amazon, pretty much every search engine, everey marketplace, every site which has a search function, everyone is figuring out how to game the system and rank high.Years ago you could potentially throw a product up on Amazon and have it sell organically. Today however Amazon is flooded with more goods than ever before. Rarely can you find a product with low competition, and even if you do, it's only a matter of time until other sellers take note of your products sales rank and swoop in to try to steal your sales.
Many sellers either directly pay for five star ratings or use review exchnages and review networks to bulk up their reviews. It's nearly impossible to get any ranking on Amazon without doing so. Good luck trying to roll out a product with 0 reviews when your competitors have reveiws numbering in the hundreds or even thousands, you just won't show up for buyers to see you period. And even if you are selling products maybe 1-3 out of every 100 buyers will actually take the time to leave a review.
It's somewhat disappointing it has gotten to the point where you essentially need to buy your way into business. Now this can be overcome if you're a good marketer and can drive your own traffic to Amazon, but just uploading a product and counting on Amazon to organically feed you sales and traffic just isn't going to happen.
So is this ethical? Well, it's legal to give away free or discounted products in return for reviews so long as it's an honest unbiased review and so long as the reviewer discloses in the review that they received the product either free or at a heavily discounted rate. In reality however, it takes away some of the legitimacy of reviews being something to count on when buying a product.
Sketchy or scrappy? We'll call this one a little of both.
Bing
The newer search engine Bing, has been striving to gain our business and take us away from Google. Some people raved about Bing when they came out, personally I've never really been crazy about the search engine.Bing is owned by Microsoft. First Bing stole Google's search results, claimed them as their own, and then denied everything.
Prior to this, Bing had copied from Apple, then they moved on to stealing from Google. Google is an enormous company with a wealth of resources. If your going to steal from Google, then get caught, at least acknowledge it. Bing was definately some sketch balls.
Oracle
Oracle named the FIRST version or release of their software "Version 2". They thought customers were more likely to buy a version two which is more likely to have the bugs worked out. Typically a version two is a more polished product. Oracle is now worth about $200 Billion...WOW.A bit misleading calling your first version of your software version two, however nobody was harmed and it's only minorly distrustful. We'll call this one scrappy. Keep hustling Oracle.
Uber
This story is pretty much the story I had in my head when I came up with the idea for this post. I had heard about this in the news years ago.Uber employees ordered and cancelled more than 5,000 rides from Lyft, the rival peer to peer ride sharing company. This decreased the availability of Lyft drivers, and hurt Lyft drivers revenue and earnings which they count on to earn a living. The employees who did not cancel got in the Lyft car and had them drive to Uber headquarters. Lyft drivers began to doubt Lyft.
We're going to call this pretty sketchy. Though somewhat clever, and though Uber has beaten out Lyft as the better known peer to peer ride provider, it was a sketchy thing to do. Futhermore, the people this affected most were the actual drivers just trying to make a living, even more so than Lyft as a company. Shame on you Uber.
The Wrap-Up
Ethics are subjective, we all have our own code we live by, we all have our own standards of what is right and what is wrong and what we are willing to do to get ahead.You can be the judge of the above stories and decide for yourself whether the ends justified the means and whether they were right in doing what they did.
You can also decide for yourself if the above tactics are above board enough to use on your own business, or if that's a direction you don't want to head in.
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