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Comment by 90s_dev | Hacker News Reader

I had a tiktok page and my book was due to people asking me to make a book based on my tiktoks. So I made the book and told them when it was done. I don't consider this advertising.

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So to be fair, you made something you knew people wanted. This is not advertisement, but it is surely marketing. (Marketing starts before you built the product)

Congrats on your success by the way!

Thanks. And yeah I guess you could put it that way. I just looked at it like, they demanded, I supplied.

How big is your tiktok following?

[flagged]

Lol then your original comment is incredibly disingenuous.

You make it seem as if you just posted your book on Amazon, did not mention it anywhere, and people started buying it.

You did market it via a direct channel to 300K people.

I had such a difficult time getting word out to the 300k people about the book, I would be glad to let even 10% of them know about it to this day. I still have 200 copies lying around and sales are dead. At most I was able to let a few thousand people know, if that.

I thought you said your book was a best seller?

It was. And entirely because of other people's videos. Two people in particular made their own videos which each got over 10M views. I didn't pay them or ask them to, they did it because they found the book funny. Pretty much all my sales came from them. That was about a year and a half ago, and sales are now dead.

Please. Even 1% of 300k is a lot of free targeted advertising. And yes that's what it is, even if you don't want to admit it. It's exactly the kind of promotional bootstrapping that OP was asking about and you pretended you didn't have to do it until we dragged it out of you.

I didn't pretend anything. If anything, I'm just an idiot, or I forgot. Don't assume malice where incompetence is sufficient to explain it. That said, the most basic, uninteresting tiktok videos get 300 views, and if you try even just a little, it's not hard to get 3k (the 1% you mentioned) and extremely common. Which sets the bar pretty low. And that's the same amount I was able to reach in my lives.

Why did you get banned?

Oh cool, the "have a pre-existing platform" gambit. Very helpful.

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