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Category: Entrepreneurship

Sneak Attack Your Competition: How To Find Out Every Single Thing About Their Website

I’ve previously spoken about reverse engineering which I think is a really powerful approach that we’ve used all our lives to build businesses and solve problems.

I’ve mentioned of wayback machine as a method to see all-time archive of the websites and the iterations that they’ve done. You can see design iterations and identify what didn’t work for them and not make the same mistakes yourself. You could see how their pricing structure iterated over-time etc. It would be fair to say it’s a “change log” of every website.

Another tool that we’ve largely used is Ghostery. It’s built for something else, but we’ve used it for all kind of fuckery (pardon my language for lack of better word).

It’s a tool that is designed to block any and all kind of trackers including ads, analytics, pixels, cookies and more. It is designed so you can have faster, cleaner browsing experience but there are other things you can use it for.

The good thing about Ghostery is that it is very transparent in providing details of every single tracker that is detected on any site. Which means, we can know exactly about most apps, plugins, modules and tools that a website uses. We can even learn about what ad networks they work with, how they fill their inventory and some even more advanced use cases.

For our influencer driven content sites, our entire advertising waterfall was built by sneaking on other publishers with large amount of premium inventory, identifying their trackers, and reaching out to the advertising suppliers of detected trackers.

You’ve to be really great at copying, before you can begin to think how to innovate.

Getting The Biggest Bang For Your Time

Some people prefer doing certain things that are extremely ineffective with regards to time but somewhat cost effective. For example, some may queue to get their cars filled with CNG (a cheaper alternate for petrol). The caveat is queue is often much much longer. People would waste hours of their day to save 20% on the fuel cost. We’ve all seen that happen at some point in our lives.

Some people go to the water filtration plants to get free and filtered water instead of having a water company like Nestle deliver that to their doors for a cost of $1.5 per 5 gallons. We’re all presented with choices like that everyday whether to save 30 minutes of our time or $1.5.

I know my choices well but at the same time I understand not all choices apply to everyone. Although, I’m curious whether many people even weigh these choices at all and regardless of what your situation is I encourage you to weigh those choices at the very minimum.

I’d save time over money every chance I get because time is money and if my time is used effectively I can make a lot more than what I would have saved by doing those manual chores.

A friend of mine asked me whether he should start a YouTube channel, or a social media agency, or a dropshipping business, or build an e-commerce brand. That’s for him to decide of course and I told him that too. He probably needs to work on what he can do better and more passionately? Since he has an internet marketing background he probably can do all of these things progressively and passionately. But it is obvious, that one of these choices would be better than the rest and he needs to take that into consideration.

Which of these options would create the maximum value in the shortest amount of time. That is what he should be doing. Short-sighted people, which I’ve been guilty of many times myself, would gauge in the revenue for each of these businesses. I’m assuming revenue won’t come easily from the YouTube channel but value will still be created outside of revenue. An asset will be created. Similarly there would be pros and cons for each of those options. Dropshipping for example could be extremely lucrative with respect to revenue, but most dropshippers fail to create any value outside of revenue at all.

Yes you can spend $100,000 on Facebook ads and generate $200,000 in revenue in a month. After taking in consideration the cost of goods sold, most likely you’re taking home $50,000 every month. But with delayed shipping times, no quality assurance on the products, you’re most likely not going to have pleased customers resulting in no asset creation. The moment you stop your operations, you realize you’ve very little repeat purchase, that you no longer have any traffic or customers on your store, and basically if you wanted to flip your store today, you’ll fetch exactly $0 for it.

My only advice is whatever you’re going to venture into always look at the value you’re going to create and the time it takes to do so. If you’re good at and passionate about 5 things, which one of these should you work on is a mathematical problem and a spreadsheet could answer that better than a friend.

Gaming The System & Little Tricks

I finished yesterday’s blog by asking if gaming the system is a good idea to make money or not. I have gamed the system all my life. When I ventured into internet marketing, the first platform I drove traffic from was Digg.com

It was a social news site kind of like reddit that doesn’t exist in its original form anymore. It was an insane source of traffic and Zeeshan mentored me well on how to really make the best out of it. We could get most stories to the front-page on a daily basis. We drove 10s of thousands of unique visits. Not just that, our content reached the eyes of editors of the largest publications in the world which would often result in backlinks and further traffic as well as SEO juice from them. I built my blog SmashingLists almost entirely out of Digg and sold it for a pretty hefty amount back then.

I loved it. It wasn’t just traffic, it was really high quality traffic. After the demise of digg and trying a few other things like StumbleUpon etc, I ventured into viral Facebook marketing. I did that briefly for about 3 months. It certainly was the darkest shade of grey. I don’t encourage anyone to choose this shade in their lives. It’s not worth it.

After that with my co-founders Saad and Zeeshan, we leveraged the organic traffic from Facebook by building and acquiring Facebook pages. Very white hat and we did it for the longest time. We built many websites and made a ton of money.

In summary, gamification of the system has been the heart of our internet marketing journey. I’ll go on to the point to state that if big tech companies claim that they haven’t done it to “hack growth” they lie. Wasn’t Facebook built by scrapping off the student list of all Harvard students? Aren’t AliExpress affiliate ads served on Torrent website popups? I have seen all these mainstream apps like ride-hailing, food-delivery, pretty much everything, capitalizing the grey areas.

Growth hackers study the systems, the AI, find the shortcomings, and capitalize on them. That’s what they are designed to do.

But some people suggest gamification is a small guy game. A few days ago, PG published this tweet

I agree with him.

I have seen or known 100s of people who have made millions and tens of millions all by capitalizing the “little tricks”. It’s totally possible. It works. There are probably a million case studies of millionaires who made it through beating the system.

Although, really big money, the unicorn status, the billions, are not made with little tricks and gamification. They are made by solving a problem so big that it helps millions and tens of millions people use the service or the product. I’m still willing to bet though, that the growth of these companies are still carried out using the “little tricks”.

Since people from emerging and under-developed world are often not so well off, to them $100 seems like a big deal and they would happily settle for little tricks and gamification as long as it provides them the opportunity to make that $100 and a road that would eventually lead them to become somewhat wealthy.

To finish this off, if you game the system, you’ll make it. If you build a product or service that helps millions of people, you’ll make that every hour what you’ll make with gaming the system in your lifetime. But even while you build a product or service that helps the people, don’t forget to game the system along the way.

Why Patent Office Is The Favorite Hangout Spot For Many Of My Friends

Many of my friends keep a sharp eye at the patent office. No, they aren’t coming up with genius design ideas that needed to be patented. They are also not patent trolls that are registering patents left and right only to troll inventors and extort money out of them. Then why do they hang around in the patent database so much? I’ll explain.

One of my friends who is a tech reporter uses patent office in order to find out the upcoming releases by the tech companies. It is obvious that if Apple is working on an upcoming feature, they will patent that first before it goes into production. This way, my friend is often able to get some super early scoops.

Another friend of mine who is an internet marketer uses patent database to get a better understanding of “policies” instead of simply reading the policy page of whatever services that he use. The policy page is almost always a guideline and you can not understand with full clarity what you can and can’t do. For example, if you’re trying to understand what ads you can and can’t run on Facebook, a policy page could be a good place to start from. But if you like to play on the line, Facebook ad patents could get you a better idea of the inner workings of the platform.

These are obviously seriously advanced use cases but a great resource for people who rely on tricks and hacks to game the system. Whether one should game the system or not, I’ll write more on this tomorrow.

You Only Have Finite Number Of Tries

For the past 21 days, I was working on one of our kitchen related e-commerce stores despite that the economics weren’t working in my favor. I usually know much sooner when to scale and when to drop but I hung around with this one longer for only one reason: I knew this could scale really really well. The caveat was, I couldn’t scale it profitably and so I spent 3 weeks trying to turn it around. I can launch 7 new stores in this time-frame.

Yesterday, a video popped up in my email inbox. Garry is a really smart guy and has experience working with and assisting hundreds of startups. The video was relevant to me and it was about timeboxing. You only have finite number of tries. Don’t waste them.

I’ve stopped chasing that store now.

Here’s the video

A Billionaire’s Advice [Part 2]

Yesterday I wrote about a meeting that I had with a billionaire in NYC and some of the advice that he gave me. When we met him, our situation was unique and it made us feel invincible. So I asked him some questions that a lot of other people probably wouldn’t. Because we had a unique relationship with him, he was very kind to us, and wanted to genuinely help us so he welcomed all questions.

The unique situation that we had was that we had successfully setup the US infrastructure including a company, payment gateway and access to other business tools that weren’t available to people in Pakistan. We were at the top of our game with regards to the revenue that was being generated and like other Pakistanis we had extra-ordinary tax benefits available for IT services and IT related services. So when he recommended that we move to US, a natural question came up that we’re able to use most American infra without paying any taxes, why would you ask us to move to US, bear higher costs of doing business and also pay insanely high taxes.

His answer was tax is what you pay for the privilege of doing business in the US. The privilege that you think you have is not nearly enough compared to the privilege that you will have once you’re here. He was vague like that. He didn’t give any specifics of what privilege other than what we already have.

He reminded us once more, “I was going to be a teller at a bank 5 years ago but I’m not. The US has something to do with that”.

I didn’t follow his advice. I’m still here in Pakistan. I know I missed a lot of things. As a digital nomad, that’s okay. But if you’re looking to build the next big thing and want to amass insane amount of wealth, you should give his advice a thought.

A Billionaire’s Advice

I and Saad met a young CEO in his 30s who is a billionaire. The meeting happened in New York City in October of 2013. He encouraged us to move to US and pursue a career there. He said if he hadn’t moved to US, which he had done only a few years before that, he would have been a teller at a bank in his home country.

I obviously didn’t take that advice as I have continued to live in Pakistan for over 7 years since that meeting. For a brief period, I had thought about taking his advice but I was only slightly motivated. And after I was turned down by an accelerator in US, I also lost the little motivation that I had.

As some of you may know, I’m a proponent of digital nomadism. There’s a freedom associated with the ability to be location independent. Moreover, $100K in US last a really short time compared to $100K in a developing country. As for the quality of life, sure quality of life is not great in Pakistan, but in theory you could have great quality of life at a small cost in many countries if you wanted.

Digital nomadism also instilled remote work habits in me. While many of my friends are going bananas now that they have to work from home, it has come naturally to me. In fact, every effort that I’ve made previously to move to an office has failed so far.

In summary, digital nomadism is great but it’s a freedom movement. It’s a hack to live well, spend less, be free and happy. However, in no way it’s the right strategy to be really wealthy. The right strategy to be really wealthy is the one outlined by the CEO we met; relocating to the land of opportunity.

I want to continue to believe that remote work is the future of work. Unfortunately the keyword here is “future”. The present of work is still in the bay area. People like Paul Graham believe US needs to have better immigration policies as 95% of the best programmers live outside of US.

But he doesn’t see hiring the same workforce remotely as a viable solution.

The world has made a lot of progress to equalize the opportunities at a global scale but we’re just getting started and there’s a long way to go. Until then, bay area is your best bet.

Why We Paid $10,000 For Our Hosting

A few weeks ago, I wrote about three types of founders. To summarize, they were big spenders, extra savers, and the ones that cut expenses in some areas bit were big spenders in others. We all should aspire to be the third type.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to be frugal with your operating expenses. If you’re not frugal with them, especially once you’re bootstrapped, you’ll always see yourself struggling with money or progress regardless of the revenue.

Not all costs are meant to be avoided though. Some costs, if you avoid them, will hinder growth of your business. Some costs of as little as $1000, could get in the way of your next $100,000 in revenue. So it’s quite important to be generous in some of the areas of your expenses. No I’m not talking about spending extravagantly on a shiny office space. I am talking about spending extravagantly on top talent, expensive tools, and education or training.

Never stop investing in yourself. Never cut corners on hiring talent. You need more talented people than yourself to build great companies. Always buy expensive tools that would put your productivity and growth on steroids.

I remember using PressLabs, a managed WordPress hosting company, for our content websites. Our monthly bill with them, at one point, was 10s of thousands of dollars. Yes, we paid 10s of thousands of dollars every month just to keep our websites online and safe. May be we could have rented a mega dedicated server for much cheaper, right? Yes, we could. However, we would still need top talent to continue to maintain that dedicated server to keep it online and safe at all times.

A few hours of outage, a malware, DDoS or ineffective caching would have been more damaging to our business and the revenue than the price we were willing to incur to keep everything online and safe at all times.

So we incurred that cost, and continued to work from our homes, because our priorities have always been clear about what to spend on and where to cut corners.

On a side note, our stats are still featured on PressLab’s front page 🙂

Running A Marathon

I don’t know anything about running a marathon. The physical one. I have never run it. To be able to do so, I’d need to train, at the very minimum for a few weeks. I’m going to struggle to run for 5 miles even. I’ll probably do it, but I may not enjoy it or consider ever doing it again.

I have however run a mental marathon. I trained for it and I enjoyed it. Although it was tiring like the physical one, I thoroughly enjoyed running it and kept going back to run it.

When you have large goals or you’re trying to build something complex, it won’t happen easily. It might be as easy as running in a straight line, but you would probably need to run for a long time and you will need to build endurance. Once you have built endurance you can probably do it over and over again. You would also enjoy every time you would run this marathon. However, if you don’t run a mental marathon for a really long time such as taking time off and putting the brain at ease, you will need to train again, just like the physical one.

Your IQ wouldn’t have changed during this time. You would still be mentally as capable as you were before, but you wouldn’t have the endurance to run a mental marathon. On the bright side though, for a former marathon runner, it’s easier to build endurance again. Easier than someone who hasn’t done it before.

If you feel you’ve big goals and the aptitude or the IQ but are somehow still helpless and incapable of getting to them, it’s the endurance issue. You get on the mental treadmill, but you’re too irregular. You build the endurance a little bit, and then you go back to your old ways. You fail to build on your previous progress. If you can do that, you’ll see yourself on the other side.

Customer Acquisition During Recession

I saw an interesting video by Garry Tan where he mentioned that startups spend as much as 40% of the funds they raise on Google & Facebook ads. That is a lot. In other words, 40% of all VC money is going to those 2 companies. This is obviously going to reduce in the coming months and so we could expect this to reflect in the earnings of these 2 companies.

During the upcoming recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the advice that seems to be coming from everywhere is to have cash runway that lasts 18 months.

In order for this to work, many startups are going to reduce their spending or risk survival. One option that all startups have is to allocate more time and resources to retain more customers instead of acquisition, as the former is often cheaper.

The startups that are going to continue to invest in customer acquisition need to know that the lifetime value of customers would most certainly be lower than what they were accustomed to. Because of this, an immediate recalibration would be required for ROI metrics. Acquiring customers on a better a ROI than before should be the norm for the next few months.

These are difficult times for everyone including us but looking into pandemics of the past suggests that all this should be over soon.