
Ask HN: Did you ever do anything unethical to get your startup off the ground? - vaksel
A lot of mixergy interviewers say that in the early days they've done things that would be considered unethical in order to get their sites off the ground.<p>A good example of this would be Facebook, which has done a ton of things early on.<p>So have you yourself(or the company you worked for) done anything that would be considered unethical to get the business off the ground?(if you are worried about your reputation just use a throwaway account)<p>This may involve:<p>- spamming comments to get links/users<p>- creating a ton of pages with keywords to get long tail google traffic<p>- scraping other's websites to fill your DB<p>- putting up an order page when your site wasn't ready<p>- putting up <i>235 users online</i> when you only had one<p>- pretending to be bigger than you were<p>- voting up your own submission on HN/Digg/Reddit<p>- creating a fake back story to make your startup interesting(we just want to save the world, we don't care about money)<p>- astroturfing your site with fake accounts<p>- sending fake numbers to get coverage(i.e. traffic, revenue, profit)<p>- buying an email list to spam people<p>- promising unrealistic delivery dates<p>- using the user's email address to spam their address book<p>- pretending the site has users when it doesn't(this hottie is 5 miles away from you, register to contact her)<p>- etc.
======
hooande
I was part of a startup years ago that did many of those things and much more.
I still won't go into the details of what it was that my cofounder did, but it
made a _big_ difference.

It was a social networking site, before social networking sites really existed
(circa 2000). I remember when the site consisted of me, him, his mom and our
kindest friends. Got maybe a few hundred unique visitors per day, at best.

Then he did X and suddenly traffic spiked. It was a thousand uniques a day.
Then tens of thousands. Then it got picked up by google. He did even more
questionable things and traffic increased even more. Next thing we knew, it
had 200,000+ registered users and was making $50k/month.

None of those things he did ever came back to haunt us. The site itself was
kind of sketch (much more myspace than facebook), so that might have helped. I
wouldn't do any of the things he did for any legitimate startup that I found.
At the same time, it seemed like it worked. Once you have "critical mass" then
the entire situation changes.

Just an anecdote to answer your question. Obviously YMMV.

~~~
Timothee
That sounds interesting, but without _the_ interesting part it's much less so.

~~~
hooande
Fine. In broad terms, he leveraged the file sharing networks of the time. He
put the name of our site on files that were shared very often and we had our
college friends seed them on various services. It seemed crazy at first, but
there is a big difference between no one seeing your name and thousands of
people seeing your name. In retrospect, it was a brilliant move.

My point was that critical mass and viral growth are powerful concepts, and
some times all it takes is one little push to get things moving.

~~~
gfodor
This isn't unethical. This is a brilliant marketing tactic. (Putting the name
in there, not the actual sharing, which I guess is unethical depending on what
you're sharing.)

~~~
noodle
i would consider soliciting someone else go share files (probably illegally)
with the explicit purpose of advertising your website to be marginal at best.

------
phamilton
We had a buy/sell site aimed at university students. At the same time, 2 other
sites cropped up. So we posted links to items from one site on the other.
Those two sites got in a pretty nasty fight ("We didn't do it" "Yeah right you
^ _& ^_&") Meanwhile we just continued growing as usual.

~~~
keefe
like so many of these posts, I am left wondering... why is that unethical?

~~~
endtime
Tricking your competitors into fighting and mistrusting one another? You don't
think that's unethical?

~~~
keefe
no? I'm not abusing someone's trust or breaking my word. Every other
consideration is subordinate to my aim.

~~~
endtime
That's a pretty measly definition of ethics. Under your definition, murder is
ethical so long as you don't lie about it.

~~~
keefe
herp derp I obviously meant it to the most extreme case possible.

I could counterargue that I gave my word not to do any wanton killing and
therefore it's prohibited and then I can wedge whatever I want into that
system.

~~~
Magneus
Call me an elitist asshole, but I find your tone infuriating.

Clean it up. Learn some respect.

~~~
keefe
it should have been totally obvious that my original statement was related to
business strategy, not homicide.

I'm well aware that I have a looser sense of ethics than average, but ethics
is a cultural construct that can be debated on its own merits.

Not abusing trust, not breaking promises and not being violent are the core
tenets of my ethical/moral beliefs - the violence one is just not relevant to
business discussions. I've often discussed this with people who have stricter
codes that are adhered to less stringently.

your comment verges on ad hominem. If somebody wants to twist my words to make
their point, yeah they'll get a little sarcasm in return.

------
prs
Greg posted a nice compilation of shady tactics used during the startup period
of major internet companies at [http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/ruthless-
enough-for-star...](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/ruthless-enough-for-
startup.html)

A quick summary:

 _Facebook_ : Spammed Harvard Students

 _BitTorrent_ : Free Porn as Initial Bait

 _MySpace_ : Spammed >100M on Launch Date

It appears as if (slightly) shady techniques can give you the advantage you
need to succeed.

~~~
nailer
BitTorrent's wasn't unethical or shady (unless you think all adult content is
shady). They'd licensed the content - which was, IIRC, an kind of free teaser
ad for 'LightSpeed' porn - which I remember as being an odd name for a porn
site. Caused a huge fuss on Slashdot.

~~~
nl
The version I heard was that they got it off Usenet, where it had been posted
by the supplier.

Sounded like a sensible way to seed the service, really.

------
ziadbc
Don't get caught up in a scam mentality. Instead think of ethical pivots on
things that would otherwise be shady. For example, Google 'scrapes' the entire
web, but no one would consider that unethical, its a search engine. On the
other hand, if they just spammed/exposed all your personal email contacts
(google buzz) that is highly likely to be perceived as unethical. At the end
of the day, be clever rather than be scammer.

~~~
jerf
Fun thought experiment: Suppose the web didn't have any search engines, but
somehow grew to its current size. Now suppose someone proposes starting one
up. Exactly how large is the resulting firestorm?

~~~
neilk
I'm tempted to say that your hypothetical is either impossible, or it's
already happened.

On the "impossible" side -- search engines, or search directories, pre-date
the web. A lot of people downloaded their first web client from a Gopher link
or by looking it up on Archie. HTML itself was kind of about providing an
index for other files -- "index.html", get it?

However, on the "already happened" front, in 1997 Ticketmaster sued Microsoft
just for linking to content on its website. And ever since automated search
engines have been around, people have been suing them -- for replicating
portions of their content without explicit permission, for instance.

------
sjs382
I wouldn't call anything he did unethical, but check out this interview with
Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo guy) about his previous startup:
<http://mixergy.com/gabriel-weinberg-duck-duck-go-interview/>

With all of the respect I already had for him, his candor in this interview
gave me even more respect for him.

------
AndrewWarner
Spamming comes up a ton in my interviews. Most recently, the founder of
Match.com said that's how he got his site's first users.

------
nphase
_\- putting up an order page when your site wasn't ready_ _\- promising
unrealistic delivery dates_

Wait, these are unethical? I thought they were standard and common sales
tactics. Seems like many companies are doing that.

(disclaimer: I don't sell anything).

~~~
ora600
Similar to promising potential customers that your product is doing things it
doesn't actually do and hoping you can add the extra features before anyone
finds out.

I view those as distasteful, but I've yet to see any company/salesperson who
doesn't do it. I'm sure this looks different once you are in sales and
everyone is doing it, but from my seat over at operations it sure looks
dishonest. I hate it when vendors use these tactics on me - so how can I do
this to anyone else?

~~~
Confusion

      and hoping you can add the extra features
    

Well, there's a difference between 'hoping' and _I'm sure we can get this
done_. As an example: our product is evolving with the needs of our customers
and as such we often promise things that don't exist yet. That doesn't mean we
don't have every intention of delivering on our promise.

~~~
ora600
I guess the question is - does the customer know they don't exist yet but you
have every intention of delivering?

------
grandalf
Scott Kliger, the founder of free411.com defrauded a company I used to work
with and our investors of $50K by agreeing to develop some technology for us
and then trying to pass off open source code as the deliverable. Meanwhile, he
used the funds to build free411.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Libel suit in .. 3 .. 2 .. 1 ..

~~~
grandalf
I don't think he'd dispute it. He gave the money back eventually, but after
he'd developed his product and obtained investor funding for it. Unfortunately
our project lost a fair bit of traction and our investors lost confidence.

------
jbhelms
I contacted a company to buy Sex Offender data. I called twice and then sent 3
emails. After a month of no replies I wrote a program that screen scraped
their site.

~~~
steveklabnik
Is screen scraping really unethical? I mean, you've sent me a bunch of text...
whatever I do with it is my business.

~~~
vaksel
it is to some people...a) you are breaking the ToS b) you are stealing their
content to resell/republish it as your own

~~~
zepolen
What if I never read or even open the ToS and proceed directly to screen
scraping your site?

Afaik there is no law that mandates you must read/agree to the ToS before
loading a website. In fact, what if the ToS states 'If you visit this site,
you must pay us 1000 dollars', are you now liable? Despite the fact that just
to _read_ the ToS you had to visit said site.

My point is that only a court will decide what happens, and just because
something is in the ToS doesn't mean it gives you carte blanch to do whatever
you please.

~~~
nailer
Sure, ToS are crap - they're not contracts and any 'extra rights' the site
gets are indeed not worth the electrons they're printed on. But copywritten
content is protected by good-old actual law.

------
endlessvoid94
For ThatHigh.com, I searched textsfromlastnight for stories containing the
phrase "marijuana" etc. Worked like a charm.

~~~
Vindexus
Then what? Posted comments pointing to ThatHigh.com I'm guessing. Did you just
put the link or did you say something like "Sounds like something from
thathigh.com"? Did they eventually get removed as spam?

~~~
endlessvoid94
nah, nothing like that. i just used it as a seed for content. there were very
few, honestly. but it was a good start.

------
AmberShah
This is probably a weighted thread since many people are connected to their
startups through their usernames and wouldn't want to post.

For me, the answer is no except for "promising unrealistic delivery dates".
For me this wasn't about lying but partly about just being unrealistic with
myself and also about setting certain goals publicly to hold myself
accountable. I don't think this is in the same boat as the other unethical
items mentioned, but of course I may just think that because that's the only
one I did...

~~~
vaksel
yeah that's why I said that they should use a throwaway account if they are
worried.

~~~
mahmud
What exactly do you gain from this "poll"? If you want blackhat, go to PPC and
adware peddling forums. Otherwise this thread does nothing but validate creepy
behavior on HN.

~~~
vaksel
the point is to show that most companies have done shady shit in the early
days and that's one of the main reasons why they managed to survive long
enough to turn legit

~~~
mahmud
Most companies? the secret to every great fortune is _not_ a 'forgotten
crime', de Balzac's opinion notwithstanding.

If we're looking for a justification for a company's under-performance, the
solution is not to look for excuses, the solution is to reflect honestly and
question our existing ideas and approaches. Otherwise we're no different than
couch-potatoes dismissing all athletes as "dopers", while drawn ourselves in a
self-righteous bag of Doritos and a liter of coke.

And lest you think I am being a hypocrite and taking the moral high-ground in
an appeal to cheap applause and upvotes; let me say that I am all in favor of
any ruthless business tactic that furthers your market dominance. Undercut the
competition, corner them, etc. But get there, first, through quality and great
service. Not by shutting down their mail servers. Go through their garbage,
but don't phish their accounts. Point out their shortcomings to the public,
but don't lawyer up and sue them out of existence or appeal to xenophobia or
use a government crutch to ban them from the market. etc.

There is a difference between war and genocide; neither is excusable, but one
of them appeals to my own warped sense of chivalry and machismo, while the
other fills me with disgust.

Of course, all of this is just my opinion, and is entitled neither to a
response nor agreement.

~~~
vaksel
it doesn't have to be a great fortune.

the reason most successful companies resorted to unethical things early on, is
because they had no resources to play "fair". Once you are actually making
money you can afford to take the high road.

yes hacking mail servers is going too far, but scraping and spamming ends up
being a necessity.

------
philwelch
PG: "A lot of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had
to resort to in the early days..."

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

------
joshu
I saw a lot of sites spam the bejeezus out of delicious when they got their
starts; folks who claim to be reputable now.

------
gyardley
It's hard to stay more ethical than your competition - tactics that would
never occur to you become pretty tempting when you see them successfully used
against your own company.

That said, for every startup that did something a little shady to succeed,
there's got to be another that went off the rails because it spent too much
time focused on and fighting with its competition. Ninety-nine percent of my
own 'competitor-focused' activity could've been much better spent on my own
business.

------
thafman
I wouldn't consider most of the actions listed "unethical" per-se, some
actions like; _"creating a ton of pages with keywords to get long tail google
traffic"_ are legitimate, while _"buying an email list to spam people"_ can be
downright illegal.

~~~
vaksel
people have different levels of what they consider unethical.

as far as keyword stuffing...google considers that blackhat so you can get
banned when they find you

------
callmeed
We sent unsolicited emails to as many addresses as we could (manually) find
online over a week or two. We're in a B2B niche so it wasn't hard to find
directories online. Never used any bulk email tool, just copied and pasted.

This was 6ish years ago. I wasn't aware of spam laws at the time. I wouldn't
recommend it but it worked.

------
Ixiaus
A startup I worked for did all of this and more - I left because some of their
tactics were getting far too shady for me. Scraping business listings to
populate your DB to make your ad network look like it was being used wasn't so
unethical as some of their spamming adventures.

------
HNer
most of top ones without the bottom 5.

The nub of the matter is this, IMO it's OK to do what you have to do to gain
momentum even if that would be classified as technically spam or what have
you, as long as you do it with style. This means sending relevant content to
people who want it but just don't know it yet, NOT sending people stuff they
may never want and what you do send has to be 100% pure quality.

90% wouldn't agree with this but IMO it depends on where you're coming from
and what the odds are against you. Just do it well and make sure that the end
result is a positive for your potential clients.

------
jscore
Great list, and couldn't come at a better time for my startup.

~~~
sabj
Taking the "Liar's Poker" approach eh? Cautionary tale >> guidebook

------
ghempton
This sounds like a todo list for a non-technical co-founder.

------
stcredzero
No, but I lied about it just now. (This is a convoluted bit of self-
referential logic and a joke.)

Seriously -- a demo where I was logged into a server and monkeypatching the DB
locks because they were broken for the piece of the site the marketing/sales
guys wanted to show.

------
maxharris
I would be very surprised if any of these things will help you at all. None of
them provide things that people really want. More importantly, attempting them
distracts you from figuring out how to find out and make what your customers
really want.

For example, you can try to spam to your heart's content, but people have this
thing called a back button. Even if you can get a few people to bite, they'll
most likely ignore you once they figure out that there's nothing there.

You can try to say "235 users online" when there aren't any, but that won't
actually give users the experience they want. It might fool them for a little
while, but that won't matter anyway if there's no reason for them to stay.

~~~
endlessvoid94
I disagree. These methods help exposure, and a fraction of those users will
actually want what you have.

That's why spamming works.

------
michaelfairley
Is it just me, or does anyone else want to be able to answer "no" to this
question without having to even think about it?

------
JangoSteve
I can't think of anything, so either I haven't done anything unethical, or I
did a damn good job of convinving myself it was ethical.

~~~
thenduks
That's the best thing about ethics, if you convinced yourself it was ethical
then it _was_ ethical for you. For someone else maybe, maybe not. Everyone
gets their own, entirely personally prioritized set :)

~~~
jiganti
I think that's defined as egoism; ethics tend to be concerned with the
theoretical value of morality.

~~~
thenduks
I see what you're saying and I don't pretend to be an expert (or even very
knowledgeable in general) on the subject.

All I meant was that ethics are a very personal thing and what's 'right' to
one person may not (and, if you ask me, _should not_ necessarily) be right to
another.

Ethical egoism says that you should do what is in your self interest, and that
doing so makes you ethical... Rather than that I'm trying to ask: What _is_
'good' or 'bad'? Different cultures, races, sexes and individuals have (at
least) slightly varying opinions on what is right and wrong.

------
prograndma
I rather called 'unethical' in loosely startup term as 'creative exploratory
of abundance wealth of opportunity'

------
inovica
Richard Branson admitted to doing something unethical and illegal in his early
days - he was caught by the authorities and he has said that it was a real big
lesson for him. I think sometimes the path to 'easy money' can be tempting

------
danbmil99
"promising unrealistic delivery dates" seems like something few of us could
plausibly claim _not_ to have done. Perhaps the question should be "promise
dates you know for sure you cannot deliver on".

------
rodh257
I wonder what the ethics of 'flattering spam' are a la the comments on this
blog post [http://www.cynotwhynot.com/blog/post/MSBuild-missing-
Microso...](http://www.cynotwhynot.com/blog/post/MSBuild-missing-
MicrosoftWebApplicationtargets.aspx)

On one hand its spam, but on the other the author can pretend it was a nice
comment from an online handbag store owner.

------
paolomaffei
I won't talk about me, but I've seen some friends doing shady things. Let's
just say I had to convince a friend of mine (for his startup) that DDoSing his
competitor at peak times wasn't a wise idea... Another guy I knew (not really
a friend) was using xrumer (a tool to spam forums for SEO purposes) directly
on his website...

------
notme123
A super early startup I worked for years ago got a really amazing deal on our
first two servers. We paid like some minimal price for some PC hardware that
was essentially out of the back of a van.

------
yread
I work at a company that did some "email campaigns" and many worse things in
the beginning. And it helped a lot - getting as many sales from a smallish 10M
country in Europe as from half of the US

------
code_duck
One, and I didn't know it was wrong at the time. So no!

I really hate how Facebook works the spam/address book angle. It is very
unethical. I don't trust facebook in the slightest.

------
321speak
You sound like you might have done all these things, half of these wouldn't
even occur to me?

~~~
spooneybarger
these are all really common amongst the affiliate marketers. and it is just
the tip of the iceberg. affiliate marketing is filled with some seriously
sleazy people who do far worse.

~~~
omarchowdhury
I believe the tactics used by affiliate marketers to gain money in the short
term, is having a negative effect on consumer confidence in web transactions
in the long term.

------
macca321
someone I know paid Philippine girls to reply to messages on his fledgeling
dating site.

------
konad
I used to crash our main competitor's email & login server at 6.01pm when free
dial-up calls started at 6pm. They ran on NT and if you opened tcp/ip port 0,
the kernel crashed. Happy times.

~~~
mahmud
Didn't any part of you refuse to do this at a more visceral level? How could
you sleep at night knowing you're cheating to get ahead? Does it even matter
if you 'win'?

I can understand gaming Google and public opinion, but directly vandalizing
someone's property and hindering their business is unconscionable.

I really want to understand the justification for this. And I say this as
someone whose moral system is flexible enough to accept bank robbery (but not
purse-snatching.)

~~~
sprout
I don't see how crashing a Windows box is any worse than robbing Goldman
Sachs. (In both cases innocent people suffer, but the target is pretty
reviled.)

I say this as someone who likes to claim he's chaotic good, but really is
pretty much lawful good.

~~~
bbq
So because the competitor used Windows, konad's actions were justified?

If that is the case, that's a very weak justification.

~~~
gloob
If a person's morality is flexible enough to permit bank robbery, then a very
weak justification is probably adequate.

~~~
joelhaus
Robin Hood ethics don't necessarily justify this type of vandalism and unless
you're living under a tyranical monarch (or some equivalent), Robin Hood
ethics are questionable to begin with.

------
ddemchuk
looks like someone has a bit of an Affiliate Marketing background :)

~~~
vaksel
only a little, make about 1-3K/mo from it.

~~~
ddemchuk
well, then as a user of this site as well as presumably affiliate forums, you
know that this site isn't too keen on the methods you listed compared to other
sites where it's considered essential TO DO those things in order to succeed,
no questions asked.

It really all depends on how far you're willing to push the boundaries

~~~
vaksel
with affiliate marketing I stuck to white hat methods, which is why I wasn't
making a lot.

