Hacker News Reader

Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

Not wishing to rain on anyone's parade, but there is no mention of broken incentives here. Tip for the marketeers, think about the users who will abuse your referral program.

* I've signed up for Amazon's free one-month Prime trial at least 20(!) times.

* I've referred myself for many different kinds of products over the years.

* My friends and I have referred each other for all kinds of things too. Sometimes with offline compensation, sometimes using the honour system for a future payback.

"Just sayin'..."

View on HN

I ran an abusable referral program once. Those who abused the referral program were the best because they kept sharing our product onto new forums telling others about how easy it is to abuse. Many of those new customers we would never have reached and most second-degree referrals didn't abuse the system, all we had to do was make that first customer feel superior to us. So it was well worth it :)

For companies like Uber and Doordash and other such companies, the system is intentionally designed to be abused.

They can use these abuse signups to show growth to the investors and rake in more money.

It's not a bug but feature.

Dunno about that, everyone is trying to sell profitability and positive FCF nowadays.

The reason this isn't mentioned is that often referral programs are designed to be abused, so that metrics can be gamed just before an important funding round, a IPO, etc.

Seen it happen many times.

> often [referral] programs are designed to be abused

Heh.

As it happens my OH and I were sitting at the local playground this afternoon chewing the workplace cud - while vaguely watching our daughter play - and were discussing how often higher management types actually know what's going on at the coal face.

"Not often enough" was our unanimous conclusion.

Past 5++ years were the golden age of VC subsidized rides, meal and grocery delivery. I never abused, but have downloaded an app, did one ride and totally forgot about the app.

> * I've signed up for Amazon's free one-month Prime trial at least 20(!) times.

I think Amazon just doesn’t care. For the last 2 years, I’ve been without Kindle Unlimited maybe 2-3 months, and that was because I was reading a series not on KU. Usually whenever I cancel, they offer me a deal. So in those 2 years, an expensive time was paying 3.33€/month, currently I’m paying 0.33€/month (for 3 months, same as the last 3 months period). Normal price is 9.99€/month. And that’s without me going out of my way to get a deal, or any referrals.

That can be part of the game! People are more likely to buy if they think they got a good deal. Make them think that, by making them hunt for coupon codes or pull these tricks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com