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Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

Much of this seems like useful lessons learned, but this particular section jumped out at me:

> To my credit at this time I would learn and do anything to get more users to my site, to the point where I was getting banned from multiple forums for posting after people told me to get lost.

How is this "to your credit"? If, as you say, the success of your product depends on getting niche users to buy in and trust that you can provide value, maybe it's a bad idea to antagonize those same users by behaving in ways that violate their community norms.

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I knew a company that did this (their marketing person would constantly make accounts on Reddit, get banned, and then try again all day) and asked them about it.

They said that only the regulars who post and comment get mad, not the lurkers. It might only be the mods getting mad if posts only lasted 15 minutes or so. So in their view it didn't matter that the mods were seething with rage as that didn't get passed on to most of the community as they removed the posts. Only the mods saw it as a flood of spam.

This seems like the product of a person who shouldn’t be in a marketing position and a ceo who can’t hire marketers.

Barring a direct measurement to the contrary it’s highly likely this marketer was damaging the companies brand. The comments and bans from moderators are surely now the top results on google when one searches <product name> reviews. If this was a viable marketing strategy every forum on the internet would be full of such posts driven by automated bots.

This is how a spammer is born. They think they have "good intentions" themselves, failing to realize they are just obsessed about getting rich/famous and no longer care about anything else, seeing spamming behaviour as acceptable if it gives them 2 new users for each forum that bans them.

This is growth hacking at it's finest. Eeking out .5% gains anywhere just to get some form of validation. Most think that they are able to infiltrate niche forums/sites and act the part but ultimately the 2nd message is always 'wow, I've just been using this tool for X and I got Y!'.

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