
How I'm using Twitter to acquire 100 uniques a day for my startup - ngjjdkdk
http://trevorstarick.com/twitter-an-untapped-well-of-potential-new-users/?
======
dang
This post was upvoted by sockpuppets. We have banned those, buried the post,
and banned the site.

Edit: We're also banning the site of the startup this was promoting, since it
has been promoted abusively on HN in the past and asking for that to stop [1]
seems only to have encouraged more.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637010)

~~~
trevorstarick
I don't get why there seems to be hostility towards Outpost. On both occasion
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637010)
and the current) the articles have been relevant to the YC community and to my
knowledge hadn't been up voted by sock puppets that we created or operated.
This article mentioned Outpost once and wasn't even centred around it. I could
have replaced Outpost with any other company and it still would have same
purpose.

~~~
dang
Our hostility is to abuse and gaming of HN. If you aren't doing it, it must be
someone else. In that case, their dedication to promoting your personal blog
is remarkable.

They managed to find their way to both of your own (now deleted) submissions
of this article from medium.com, and then helpfully re-submitted it from your
personal domain and ring-voted it up. They don't seem interested in anything
else, either. Quite the fans.

------
gone35
The idea of directly engaging potential users actively seeking/asking for a
particular product/service on Twitter is very interesting; but unfortunately
the way you are implementing it right now is unethical and in violation of
Twitter's Automation Rules and Best Practices [1]:

"Creating serial or bulk accounts with overlapping use, however, is
prohibited."

I initially thought you were using your company's own Twitter account for
messaging people; instead, by your own admission [2], you have resorted to
using multiple 'realistic' accounts:

[https://twitter.com/search?q=outpost.travel](https://twitter.com/search?q=outpost.travel)

This kind of growth hacking is misleading and unethical, and I think it has no
place in Hacker News.

[1] [https://support.twitter.com/groups/56-policies-
violations/to...](https://support.twitter.com/groups/56-policies-
violations/topics/237-guidelines/articles/76915-automation-rules-and-best-
practices)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720634)

~~~
consta
Well you can always argue what is right and what wrong. Very true, it is a
violation of the Twitter terms of services but I still appreciate it for
sharing with the HN community.

There has also been a post about Darkmarket
([https://github.com/darkwallet/darkmarket](https://github.com/darkwallet/darkmarket))
on HN. Again, I do not encourage trading illegal goods at all but as a proof
of concept it is still impressive.

------
Theodores
The amount of startup-culture Kool Aid going on here is quite mesmerising.

First the product, 'let's aggregate the aggregators!!!'

The monetization: those affiliate marketing codes everyone else uses!!!

Then there is the user acquisition strategy. Getting some intern to post stuff
to Twitter for you.

The spin off product: a Twitter spamming machine!

Then there is 'sharing economy'. Is this really all it amounts to?

~~~
untog
Hacker News is so much more honest at this time of day, before Silicon Valley
wakes up.

It'll never last, they're going to disrupt us any second now.

~~~
dang
I'm not sure what you find honest about this behavior, but you're right that
it isn't welcome on Hacker News.

------
vidarh
Have you considered what potential there is for scaling in up? Because if all
you are getting that way is 100 uniques a day, the effort involved sounds like
it'd make it a net loss compared to simply buying the traffic via paid
advertising. If the tweets continue to generate additional referrals down the
line, then of course it might change.

But frankly, having seen the travel space up close, I find this system more
interesting than your startup...

~~~
techaddict009
Asking out of curiosity Is it legal to automate tweet in twitter? I mean if
twitter detects someone is doing so wont they ban them?

Edit: I Read the post properly the replies are manual not automatic so I don't
twitter will have any issue with it.

~~~
drazion
It might be ok to automate tweets, but this particular service might run afoul
of Twitter's spam rules

Per Twitters Rules for Identification of Spam[1]

-If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;

-If you send large numbers of unsolicited @replies or mentions in an aggressive attempt to bring attention to a service or link;

[1][https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311#](https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311#)

------
phpnode
If this trick is still really working for you, please, do yourself a favour
and shut up about it. Drawing attention to it is not going to end well for
you, either twitter shuts you down or people just copy your idea and it loses
effectiveness. The correct time to write about these things is when they stop
working.

~~~
imjared
All he's doing is smartly parsing the results of Twitter searches. This isn't
really groundbreaking, it just requires some legwork.

~~~
phpnode
I agree, but the general point is that specific marketing tricks that work
well should be hoarded, not shared, because sharing them destroys their value.

~~~
gk1
> "because sharing them destroys their value."

... Why?

Because it'll lower your competitive advantage? If your main competitive
advantage is knowing about some cheap Twitter trick--sorry, I mean "Growth
Hack"\--then you need to rethink your game plan.

~~~
phpnode
because sharing them makes them stop working. No one said anything about this
being his main competitive advantage.

------
austenallred
I wrote something similar to this, but more for the layman. Kind of a step-by-
step guide to Twitter user acquisition. [http://www.austenallred.com/the-
hackers-guide-to-the-first-1...](http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-
guide-to-the-first-1000-users-twitter/)

Before we launched were were getting about 50 signups/day from Twitter at our
landing page - around 150 visits.

------
phea
This is unscrupulous, even the account that submitted this to HN is only 3
hours old and I'm guessing most of the upvotes have been faked.

~~~
trevorstarick
My account had posted it from Medium earlier but I realized how SLOOW it was
loading so I loaded up a Ghost Blog droplet for Digital Ocean and reposted it
there. I needed a new account to post it on behalf of so a smashed my
keyboard. Voial!

~~~
dang
The reason you didn't address what phea said is that you promoted this story
through abusive techniques. So abusive, in fact, that we're banning your main
account too, as well as this site.

Edit: We're also banning the site that you've abusively promoted here in the
past [1].

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637010)

------
crixlet
I'm not affiliated with it, but LeadSift does something similar to this and is
actually pretty good at it for picking up new lead opportunities
[http://leadsift.com/](http://leadsift.com/).

------
mhp
This post is doing something a bit different and probably more useful, but it
reminds me of the people that search Twitter for mentions of their competitors
and then try to convince those people to use their product instead. I see this
every once in awhile when I search for our product mentions and it makes me
sad. I'm sad because it's a huge waste of time for them and they are actually
damaging their brand (not ours).

Even though Twitter is public, there's still a sense that some random person
isn't just going to start replying to your tweets.

------
rbobby
I wonder if they are using paid interns or unpaid interns? Makes me wonder if
the cost of paid interns was put towards regular advertising whether it would
generate a better return.

~~~
givehimagun
Unpaid interns would be a violation of labor laws if you're simply not paying
them for work you would normally pay for.

------
NIL8
99% of the time this technique will not be worth while.

However, there are niche markets where this could be useful. This is
especially true when the user has a limited means to pay for ads.

------
pnathan
This isn't a complete story.

\- How many of those users convert to cash in the bank and recurring
customers?

\- Has this actually resulted in a better ROI than other means?

\- Does this sort of semi-solicited tweet advertising gain or lose goodwill?

From a tech standpoint, this is cool, from a business standpoint, it's not
proven yet from this writeup. IMO.

------
esMazer
Security Notification

Per company security policy you have been denied access to the website:
[http://trevorstarick.com/twitter-an-untapped-well-of-
potenti...](http://trevorstarick.com/twitter-an-untapped-well-of-potential-
new-users/)

Reason: Not allowed to browse this Botnet site.

------
chippy
The thing to remember here is that the replies are being crafted by a human.
It's a very sensible thing to do.

If you were to use the same procedure but send the replies off using a bot and
the API, then I believe that it would be against the Twitter ToS.

~~~
trevorstarick
It was what I originally was planning on doing but felt that a personal
response would be better than a bot. During the hours of 3am - 9am I do set it
up to be auto replies but there's not much traffic anyways. There are similar
Twitter bots that do this and I've spoken to someone from Twitter about a grey
of the ToS area I might be able to work in.

~~~
Nogwater
If there isn't that much traffic between 3am and 9am, then why is it worth it
to spam during those hours?

------
sireat
File this nothing new under the sun,

I know a few people who worked on a startup doing exactly this some 2-3 years
ago.

Problem was it would not really scale plus Twitter really limited the free
pipe.

There were a lot of hotels interested, but not enough to pay.

------
mikkom
"How I'm spamming Twitter to acquire 100 uniques in a day"

~~~
shawabawa3
To be fair, if you post a question on twitter you can hardly call it spam if
someone answers it, even if it's with their own product

~~~
mikkom
I think the question is, how spammy would you think if 1000 other people would
do the same? How relevant would the answers be if every answer would have 100s
of answers from bots that are advertising their service?

~~~
wpietri
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. "What if everybody did that?" is a
great framework for considering the effects of novel behaviors.

~~~
knewter
literally is just Kantian ethics

------
uptown
Great innovative lead-gen. I'm more curious about your database of
destinations. Do you have formal partnerships with the sites you're linking-to
to syndicate their listings?

------
alecsmart1
Am wondering if there are an API based services which can be used for NLP?
Something cheap because the number of messages to be processed will be
extremely large.

~~~
izendejas
Not sure what your budget is like, but here's one that does entity extraction
and classification.

[https://www.mashape.com/jetlore-dev/semantic-text-
processing...](https://www.mashape.com/jetlore-dev/semantic-text-
processing#!documentation)

Demo:

[http://dev.jetlore.com/tech-demo/text-processing-
api/entity-...](http://dev.jetlore.com/tech-demo/text-processing-api/entity-
extractor)

Disclosure: I used to work for Jetlore.

------
joushx
As an very active twitter user this kind of behaviour is very anoying for me.
I would never klick one of these.

------
AliAdams
I think AirBnB might have a problem with your website's design.

------
josefresco
Wondering how much of this new traffic converted into customers...

------
ZirconCode
"they’re are" _twitch_

------
0xjvm
Glorified spam.

------
trevorstarick
I'm planning on doing a more in-depth write up on how NER/NLP in the
tweetosphere is different that general NER/NLP which will by me technical
explanation of what I did here. That should be up sometime later this week.

~~~
brianbreslin
Can you elaborate more on how having these specific tweets helps your specific
startup or how you are converting them from casual tweeters to your new users?

Right now there is a big disconnect in the post. I am guessing its because you
assume the reader understands even what ner/nlp is

------
ashwin_kumar
"Over the past decade"? Actually founded on March 21, 2006
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter))
:)

~~~
trevorstarick
Over the past eight years didn't sound as sexy.

~~~
teach
Be very very careful with this sort of thing. Try "the better part of a
decade" if you want a phrase with a similar ring but actual truth behind it.

