Hamad Dar's Blog

Do We Choose Grey Hat, Or The Grey Hat Chooses Us

I met this guy in 2009. That’s 11 years ago. He always wore a hat. He loves them.

He taught me how the systems are gamed. I loved it. We were on the Digg’s front-page everyday. We worked for the top guys. I will probably not name them today. May be they don’t want to acknowledge they gamed the system too.

The system was nothing but a recommendation engine. One of the first I had seen. When Twitter and Facebook ranked posts chronologically, Kevin Rose had the recommendation engine figured out. We just knew how to make the best use of it. Reverse engineering it, I would say.

One of our clients in the sports niche got acquired for $150 million dollars. Almost all of our clients are a multi million dollar properties today.

We even made some of our own tiny sites that we drove from Digg.

Over time, struggling between gaming the system for growth, solving an actual problem or doing both at a time, 2020 came.

Today, I’m wondering, how do you build a global business from Pakistan that could one day grow large enough?

How do you hire white people or black people or asian people or anyone to cast them in your ads? Can you? Are there any in this country? If yes, are they actors? They probably aren’t and you probably can’t.

You could outsource though. For tens of thousands of dollars perhaps? Or millions of Pakistani Rupees that you can most likely save in 5 years working in a day job.

If you’re bootstrapped, which you most likely will be because there aren’t any VCs here, what would you do? Would you get that ad made? Or would you pick a hundred ads from the internet, break them apart, and stitch them enough times that they qualify for “fair use” and become DMCA-free. This would probably cost you $50.

Forget about the ads. Not all businesses advertise and advertising could be just one of the many things about building a business. You will most likely require certain kind of digital infrastructure for sure. PayPal? Ability to accept cards i-e payment gateways? But there are none that support this region. What do you do?

You could fly to US or another supported region, setup a company, and use that to setup the rest of the digital infrastructure. But most likely you’ll never get a visa and you probably also can’t afford this travel easily. If you think I’m exaggerating, I know at least 5 tech entrepreneurs from Pakistan who have built multi million dollar businesses but were declined US visit visa.

May be you could fly to one of 31 visa free countries? But they are just as good as your own country as far as the digital infrastructure and access to business tools is concerned.

You could reach out to friends or relatives in US and form a company in partnership with them. You could use that company to setup PayPal, payment gateway and other business tools that you need to begin your business.

But there’s more. You will most likely be banned at some point once you access these business tools physically from within Pakistan.

What do you do then? You could rent a server physically in US. Remote Desktop Protocol. You could access that server remotely and run your business on that. Sounds sketchy, doesn’t it?

But you could get banned for that too. Because it’s not that big of a deal for these multi billion and trillion dollar companies to understand the difference between a data-center’s IP and that of a home in US.

So may be you could buy a Raspberry Pi that you could physically place in someone’s house in US. I’m confident none of my friends or relatives would agree to this. It would seem strange to them that why would someone want to do it? They would think that there could be something malicious going on that could land them in trouble.

You could also buy a laptop and physically place that in their houses and run your businesses with remote access. I know my cousins aren’t going to like that idea. May be yours do.

By the time you would come this far, you would have exhausted 83% of your energies in setting up the the foundation to start your business.

Thousands of entrepreneurs from Pakistan actually have to go through all of this (and more) to actually start their businesses. May be you see a scammer, but I see a victim that turned around his fate and became a hero.

So what happened there? Did we choose that grey hat, or did that grey hat choose us?

Facebok’s Infamous Ban Hammer & The Best Case Against AI

Facebook’s robots are great at finding customers. You can create a CBO with 10 ad-sets targeting 10 different things, 5 creatives for each of the ad-sets and the robots will start optimizing on the first day to get you purchases before you’ve even spent $50. That’s great, isn’t it?

When Facebook’s AI gets mad at you though, its quite like Skynet from the Terminator. It tries to erase you and it goes to great lengths to do so. Let me explain that one.

What happens when you use a credit card on Facebook that was issued in your name but by a different country than the one you’re residing in? You’re accused of credit card theft of course. Then you go to great lengths to justify it but it doesn’t work. Then after a few days of efforts, you make it work. But doesn’t matter if you’ve made it work even, cause that’s strike # 1 and AI is going to be tougher with you.

What happens next? One of your ads is rejected for “circumventing Facebook’s advertising policies”. You appeal it, and the ad gets approved. Doesn’t matter though, cause that’s strike #2.

And just like that, before you know it, you lose you business manager. Because you as a person was the cause of trouble, you also lose your personal ad account. In addition you lose your ability to advertise on Facebook or add or remove anyone or anything in any business manager.

If this sounds bad, let me tell you what else happens.

Any pages that you have previously advertised on Facebook get penalized too including the one for this blog that you’re reading. It doesn’t matter if the advertising was done months ago, you still get the hammer. The page gets zero reach syndrome.

Oh Facebook, why does it always have to be this way? Am I always going to feel this way about you?

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.

A Lot Of Moving Parts & Perfect Synchronization

Every business has a lot of moving parts. They all need to move together and in synchronization for the business to continue to work.

Businesses have control on many of the moving parts. For example, for an e-commerce business you have control over what creatives you make, how your landing page looks, what should be the selling price, where do you source your products from and what source of traffic would you use etc.

Each business has some moving parts that we don’t have so much control on. For example we don’t have a lot of control on the on going auction prices in the Facebook’s bidding system. That would depend on the over-all advertising competitiveness of the traffic source and is not something one can control.

Some parts of the business are predictable whether you have control on them or not. For example despite having no control over the on-going auction rates, it is predictable that the auction rates will be higher in the last quarter and you can use predictability to your advantage despite having no control on the auction prices.

Some parts of the business are not too predictable. The pandemic is the greatest example of that. We neither have any control over it nor could we predict it.

However, for the business to work, all parts that you can control or not and all parts that are predictable or unpredictable need to be aligned together. If they are aligned, you will have a booming business. If not, you will have a bumpy ride.

It’s kind of like a solar eclipse. You know how the earth, sun and moon are moving. You could even predictably say when the eclipse will happen. But it will only happen when all three are aligned.

What Is Ad Blindness & How To Deal With It

As the consumers continue to get forced to see ads on all platforms, they subconsciously or consciously stop seeing them. They learn to spot where the ads are and what the ads are and show no interest in interacting with them.

As early as in my childhood, we would often switch channels as soon as the ads came. In hindsight we couldn’t have seen anything more meaningful in those 5 minutes on a different channel, we just liked avoiding ads.

On Youtube, we’re all hoping to click the skip ad before the button is even there. I have actually spent sometime looking into a way to block YouTube ads or a script that could skip ad before the skip button.

On Facebook, where we spend most of our ad money, the ads that look like ads have constantly been under a decline. Instead the ads that look like native content do not just perform better, but are also rewarded by Facebook by lower advertising costs.

If you advertise on Facebook/Instagram and unable to get results, it’s likely the creatives. The single biggest driver of your results are your creatives and your audiences are showing blindness to the ad-content just as the humans have continued to do ever since the advent of advertising.

If you have not already moved to UGC (user generated content), you immediately should. The reason why the whole world goes bananas about the influencers is because the ads fit in natively. The best part about UGCs is that not only you’re going to make more money with your ads, the creative costs will also go down significantly as you can now shoot your ads with iPhone and a couple of creators.

The Tall Poppy Syndrome

On the surface it seems that the world want to appreciate the high achievers. Ironically though, as the high achievers start to stand out, they are mocked and down-played for only one reason: for being a high achiever. This is what is referred as the tall poppy syndrome.

All poppies should grow together, and the tall poppies should be cut to size. While this might work okay for poppies, we’re not supposed to be cutting humans like that. Unfortunately, the syndrome runs so deep that many high achievers often feel the same way about other high achievers. This is a toxic culture, and to abolish it we need to acknowledge it.

I have been both victim of and guilty of the tall poppy syndrome but continue to learn to deal with it in both cases.

If you’re guilty of doing it, I encourage you to learn to deal with your emotions of jealousy and envy because it’s neither helping you, nor your victicm.

If you’re victim of it, don’t let other people’s insecurities destroy your own self-esteem and growth.

Humans aren’t poppies, and we should be proud albeit humble of growing tall.

An Ecom Lesson I Learnt From The Most Unexpected Place

I always talk about long-term. Long-term wealth making. Compounding. Doing things that not only generate income and revenue but also build assets.

I have been guilty as well as proud of working on short-term opportunities with really great returns. Without those, I couldn’t have been where I am. But to go forward from where I am, I know long-term opportunities are the way to go.

I got a much needed reminder with regards to the e-commerce business but from the most unexpected of places. During Ramadan, I’ve continued to play Hamds and Naats on YouTube in the background while I work. As algorithm continued to play more and more of them it took me to an unexpected video by Junaid Jamshed where he explained a very important business concept. The concept of transparent as well as consumer friendly business ethics and policies. He quoted the following examples

The smallest stores in the world decline returns and refunds. The smallest stores in the world sell counterfeit or low quality products. On e-commerce, they can sometimes take advantage of the anonymity and can continue to pop up again and again with new names and of course amass wealth. They don’t stay so small.

But they don’t become Walmart either. Because to become a trillion dollar company like Amazon, or another large retailer like Walmart or Target, you have to adhere to certain ethics and be more consumer friendly. If you’re in for the short haul, a bad customer experience or even scamming them out of money could be a great choice but if you’re in for the long haul, a good customer experience is your only bet of ever making it.

Why Are These Exactly Opposite Money Events Happening At The Same Time

I am not an economist. I know nothing about it. Although, I like to preserve my wealth and I also like to read a lot about how to do that. So you can call me wealth preserver.

There are two money events happening right now. One of them is that the Federal reserve continues to print trillions and trillions of dollars to stimulate the economy. The other one is that Bitcoin is cutting its printing rate to half in about 7 days.

Both the events are happening at the exact same time.

When you increase supply of one thing by a lot and trade it with something of a fixed quantity, you’ll either need to pay more of the asset with an increased supply or get less of the asset with fixed quantity.

The long-term impact of the first event is that you’ll need more pieces of paper to buy assets with fixed quantities such as real estate.

The long-term impact of the second event is that you’ll need less number of Bitcoins to buy assets with fixed quantities such as real estate.

Disclaimer: This is not an investment advice and should not be taken as one. I accept no responsibility for any loss, damage, cost or expense incurred by you as a result of any error, omission or misrepresentation on this site.

How Facebook Campaign Objectives Work – A Case Study

It is a matter of common sense for years that Facebook tags groups of people from within an audience for various objectives. What this means is if you run an ad for “cooking” interest that may have 100 million people in the audience, and your campaign objective is engagement, Facebook will only show your ads to users tagged as engagers from within the 100 million audience size.

Similarly, if you run a conversion ad on the same interest of “cooking”, Facebook will show your ad to “purchasers” from within the 100 million audience.

But there’s more to the story.

A friend of mine asked me whether he should select campaign objectives that are cheaper in nature for really warm audience. For example, he wondered if “reach” or “engagement” ads should be run for custom audiences of people who have added the products to cart or initiated check out etc.

I told him that this probably won’t yield better results than the conversion objective since Facebook doesn’t just work by tagging users but takes many other data points in consideration. So I ran a test. And here are the results

Click on the image to see full version

Both the audiences are 100% identical. RT Reach has campaign objective of Reach. RT has campaign objective of Conversion.
The CPM of reach objective is 1/10th. It was 10 times cheaper to run the reach ads on my warm audience.
Despite the warm audience, CTR was 1/3rd for reach ads.
Despite lower CTR, more clicks were generated for reach ads. (10 times more impressions and 1/3rd CTR = 3 times more clicks)
Despite more clicks and cheaper CPC (0.11 for reach & 0.28 for conversion), cost per ATC, cost per IC, cost per Purchase was much higher for reach ads.
Cost per purchase for reach ads was nearly 2.5x of cost per purchase of conversion ads.
Reach ads saw ROAS of 0.76 while conversion ads saw ROAS of 2.22

Conclusion

While Facebook could be taking thousands of data points in consideration, I want to highlight the basis of why the reach ads underperformed.

Campaign objective doesn’t just tag users, but also decides whether your ads will appear early in the newsfeed or down below capturing higher attention vs lower attention of the same warm users.

It may also take into account the time of the day for when each individual purchaser makes a purchase. By running reach as campaign objective you’re reaching your “purchasers” at a time when they won’t initiate a purchase.

The conversion objective could take individual placements and platforms in account for each individual user etc.

In summary, the campaign objectives do not just work by “tagging” various groups within the audience but also take into consideration many other data points.