
A LinkedIn Hack That Led to a $120k Investment - samp615
http://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000
======
aclimatt
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
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
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?

~~~
meric
Also the most valuable technology companies tend to retain their original
founders in leadership positions.

------
aresant
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...](https://pando.com/2012/05/02/vungles-co-founders-hustle-their-way-
to-a-2-million-seed-round/)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/06/25/dont-
try-t...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/06/25/dont-try-this-at-
home-how-vungle-broke-in-to-silicon-valley/)

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

[http://www.businessinsider.com/the-linkedin-hack-that-
turned...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-linkedin-hack-that-turned-a-
penny-into-100000-2015-4)

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](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

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

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

~~~
jaksmit
I also don't know if it would apply here. As these are "native" ads to
LinkedIn. They don't really label them as ads much. I guess if the <div>
mentions ads then it might be blocked.

~~~
quadrature
I dont use linkedin much but I just tested it and it blocked 4 ads on the
page.

------
mendelk
> 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-...](http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-
roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/)

HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931)

~~~
jaksmit
yep, his was a funny 'hack'

------
PascLeRasc
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?

~~~
jaksmit
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
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.

------
will_brown
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"?

~~~
jaksmit
@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_brown
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.

------
mpeg
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. :)

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

~~~
mooreds
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?

~~~
alain94040
Me (the user), I just want to tell you that I'm meeting John at PayPal next
Tuesday. You (service): consider it done.

I don't want to deal with opening a LinkedIn ad account and figuring it out.

~~~
yumraj
Exactly. Many (or shall I say most) people don't have the time to figure this
out, especially across social networks. So, if it's reasonably priced it'd be
definitely worth it, for example before a VC meeting ;).

I believe there is a service which allows you to search and find common
interested with the person you're meeting, but this to me is more interesting.

If anyone wants to build this, feel free to ping me, would be happy to give
feedback as well as sign up as a beta customer.

------
downandout
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).

~~~
jaksmit
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.

------
misiti3780
I wonder how they came up with 7 as the minimum number required to target?

~~~
misiti3780
downvoted - really ?

~~~
dsp1234
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.

------
spyder
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.)

~~~
jaksmit
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
;)

------
GCA10
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.

~~~
jaksmit
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.

~~~
zachmachuca
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.

~~~
jaksmit
the evolution of my role at Vungle would be a bit of a longer story. I
wouldn't describe it as being 'pushed out' exactly. But I feel that my
business partner scaled with the company a lot better than I did personally.
Me leaving certainly wasn't as dramatic/interesting as something like the
Twitter founding story for example.

------
giech
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...](http://theory.stanford.edu/~korolova/Privacy_violations_using_microtargeted_ads.pdf)

------
Phr34Ck
the title is hilarious. It got you traffic, good for you. The article itself
is nothing but a bag of SEO? words.

~~~
samp615
What words would it possibly be trying to rank for? Stop being a hater.

~~~
markcerqueira
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.

~~~
zachmachuca
Correct, but even YC classifies that as a hack. If you have ever checked out
the YC Application they ask of a time where you have hacked an existing system
to make it work in your favor. If this doesn't qualify as a hack then I don't
know what does.

------
dreamfactory2
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.

~~~
jaksmit
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!

------
brianpetro_
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fthehustle.co%2Fthe-
linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fthehustle.co%2Fthe-
linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000)

------
kkt262
Love this article. It's always great to think outside the box, and the author
of this article definitely did that.

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

~~~
jaksmit
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.

------
lifeisstillgood
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

------
woof
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...

~~~
jaksmit
@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!

------
Rogerh91
New extension to this idea: retarget people who visit your landing page.
Frequency effect loop.

------
ygol
cool

------
dsugarman
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.

~~~
theseatoms
> 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.

~~~
jaksmit
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.

------
impish19
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-...](http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-
roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/)

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

------
atorralb
alot of 12's in that article

