I'm not sure why you posted this. Are the pageviews from the controversy really enough to offset a long-term loss of reputation? Maybe you don't understand the line you crossed.<p>You advertised video courses taught by talented entrepreneurs. Later, you launched what is effectively a forum. These two things are hardly similar, but you charged users for the latter when they signed up to pay for the former.<p>Couch it in as many euphemisms as you want, but you tricked people for your own gain. I don't want someone to do that to me, and I won't do such a thing to someone else. Unfortunately, you didn't treat others as you like to be treated. I think that's unethical.<p>In the future, please treat your customers with more honesty and respect.
You lied to customers to get something valuable from them (in this case, the information that they were prepared to pay you, and their engagement with your site). You used this, by your own account, to gain $4000. I wouldn't want to make a large bet that that isn't fraud and outright illegal.<p>It probably isn't, unfortunately. But I hope your company fails. You should not get away with such behaviour.<p>A decent person would learn from all the people here saying "This is not an acceptable way to behave", and issue an apology for boasting about how they made a profit from deceiving their customers. I wonder: are you a decent person?
Launching early is certainly a good thing. Launching a product that is only a proof of concept so people can really see what you're trying to do is also a good idea. But taking people's money under the banner "WE'RE A COMMUNITY OF ENTREPRENEURS THAT HELP EACH OTHER." when no such community exists seems borderline dishonest.<p>When 5.5% of your initial customers feel scammed and are are upset about being deceived it may be an "acceptable loss" from a business perspective, but I certainly don't think that's a "great result". 5.5% is a lot. For comparison, an eBay vendor with that many unhappy customers wouldn't last long.<p>Bootstrapping communities is notoriously difficult, and I'm well aware that the use of "community building hacks" are more the norm rather than exception, but I'm still not going to applaud this behavior.
This type of thing has the potential to ruin the reputation of startups everywhere. If it isn't outright fraud (selling people something that doesn't exist) I'm not sure what is.<p>I'm amazed someone has the gall to boast about this type of thing publicly while blatantly ignoring the long-reaching repercussions their actions could have throughout the entire startup community.<p>People routinely go to prison for similar types of deception in other industries. It is a slippery slope that is surely testing the bounds of fraud while ruining the reputation of legitimate startups everywhere.
Interesting - he gave a talk on this at Microconf Europe which was this last weekend, and a very good conference with lots of cool and interesting people. There was (I thought) something of a feeling in the room of "hrm, maybe this is a bit over the line?" although everyone was appreciative of the fact that it was a much stronger validation of the idea than just handing over an email address. Watching Adii talk, I certainly got the impression he was not 100% happy with the approach himself, and wrestled with it some.<p>OTOH, I can understand the risk avversion: if they've given you a CC number (they were not, however, charged), they're a Real Customer and your product is far more likely to have legs than just getting an email address, which is in turn better than not even having a pre-launch page and just hoping people want whatever it is you've slaved away building for months. Spending a lot of money to build something only to find no one wants it, or wants a fairly different version sucks big time!
If you use deception to found a company, you'll find reasons to continue using it while running the company, and you'll eventually lose the company because of it.<p>There are ways to measure buying signals. Please research them. Here, I'll do you a solid, and Google "how to measure buying signals"<p>Oh, look: <a href="http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/can-you-get-roi-from-simple-words-on-twitter/" rel="nofollow">http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/ca...</a><p>While it's not my intention to hold this up as <i>the</i> authority on buying signals, what you will pick up on is that nothing on this page talks about the number of subscribers on an email list. Subscriber counts are, <i>at best</i> a weak buying signal. It measures interest, not willingness to purchase.
It already goes right up to my ethical "pain threshold" to have a "buy" button that links to a page that says "sorry! we're not quite ready yet. enter your email here" just to gauge interest. It's questionable.<p>This goes way beyond that. This is no longer a grey area. This is lying to potential customers. Justify it however you want, it's wrong.
This is specifically what services like Kickstarter were designed to address. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that crowd-funding services are viable funding models, especially for low budget projects like this.<p>This feels like deception for the sake of deception and I would have been among those who were pissed had I signed up.
The comments here have covered all the shady/illegal aspects of the post, but the most dangerous part (and you may not experience it in person outside of major tech areas): people get <i>really</i> excited about manipulating and abusing others for their own gain (especially small numbers of technically competent people abusing large numbers of "normals").<p>People are just anonymous hits online, right? Drive up the hits. How? Just manipulate people. Oh, we got money? Chest bumps and high fives all around. We did it!<p>When you start thinking about "right" or "wrong" when doing work like this, your world falls apart, so you don't think that way. You run the hustle. You run the borderline-illegal practices all in the name of growth. When you're successful it'll all be forgiven by rich people who want to leech of your success anyway.<p>If we keep telling ourselves it's bad/wrong/illegal, all the people willing to do this shady work will end up ruling the world while we still sit on our poor sanctimonious asses.
TL;DR - Putting up a marketing site and asking for money up front sets customers expectations for what is to be delivered. But startups change significantly in the early stages, so it's very difficult to meet customer expectations.<p>I'd like to hear more about what people said in the customer interviews. Here's my experience as a consumer...<p>After flipping through the library, I signed up immediately. The cost/value was very high.<p>After putting in my credit card details, I was put in a queue, which was a little frustrating as I was expecting instant access, but I got over it quickly and didn't mind waiting. I think this was fine.<p>The big problem came when the library disappeared from the site and the business went in a very different direction. I had pledged $30/month for something specific (the videos from high-profile entrepreneurs), so it was disappointing to see that it wasn't going to happen. It even entered my mind that it was only ever a carrot to get my credit card details and that there was never an intent to make the videos. So, some confidence lost there. Also, still having my credit card on the hook for something else that I hadn't yet learned about was a bit disconcerting.<p>Adii is a friend and I was still curious about what it would be, so I stuck with it. It's highly likely if I didn't know the founder, I would have cancelled immediately.<p>I struggle to consistently participate in communities, so I will be cancelling my membership. The video library was more my thing, consumption without engagement. And that's what I pledged my $30/month for.
I am currently doing a startup too. It seems that I can handle all the design, coding and technical side of things but I cannot market and do sales.<p>Although I agree with some of the points such as launching early and the communication aspect of it. I'm against deceptive tactics to get sales. Even though he said that it didn't feel good, then why continue with the same tactic? Does getting the sales and numbers justify the actions?<p>I'm in the same boat as the author at the moment and if anyone out there has any advice I would greatly appreciate it.<p>Thanks in advance.
I have mixed emotions about this strategy.<p>On the subject of deception, Adii hasn't yet replied to my comment about this section from his previous article:<p>"So I took the testimonials that they had left on my Clarity profile, reworked them (for the purpose of my book) and sent it to the individuals (along with a sample chapter of the book) for approval."<p><a href="http://publicbeta.co/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-a-landing-page-without-social-proof" rel="nofollow">http://publicbeta.co/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-a-landin...</a>
I'm pretty sure this tactic would cross a line for me personally. Different story if you actually started out with even just 1 video, but to base a sale on a lie of content not yet created is a bit dubious.<p>I wonder if you looked in to your legal obligations at all? I know in the UK a company has a duty to trade fairly and not mislead consumers....I'm not sure to what extent you fall foul of the law if you do something like this?
Why in the world would anyone title a blog post this way? It sounds like he purposefully went out of his way to phrase his tactics in the worst possible way. Call it "market testing", call it "product validation", anything but "selling shit I didn't have".<p>Worst PR ever.
A good read. However, the first rule of using white lies is you don't talk about it (in public - this would be a great thing to use PublicBeta for! ;-)) otherwise you get the sanctimonious types in the peanut gallery excited, as some of the comments here demonstrate.
"Obviously being open and sincere about all the facts after the deception helps, but it also contradicts the very fact that you were deceitful."<p>I don't understand how this is going to help anybody's cause.
"If other people knew we didn't have the content, they probably wouldn't sign up any more."<p>Damn straight I wouldn't. And I sure as hell wouldn't be giving you my credit card details to <i>store on file</i>. I don't care what your PCI compliant third party provider is like, if I give you my credit card details, unless its a refer payment, then you debit it and throw away the card details.<p>This is totally unethical business practice. It's a bait and switch as far as I'm concerned!
Honest question:
taking customers' billing information with the promise of a product at a later date without they <i>actually knowing</i> that you don't even having the product. (more importantly when customers' are made to think the product exists: <a href="http://publicbeta.co/library/" rel="nofollow">http://publicbeta.co/library/</a>)<p>Is it even legal?
That's seems immoral and just wrong.<p>The angry customers you get can ruin your reputation very very quickly. Angry customers are the ones that usually go out of their way to write bad reviews.