{"id":2475,"date":"2020-04-28T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-28T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hamad.blog\/?p=2475"},"modified":"2020-04-28T17:48:06","modified_gmt":"2020-04-28T12:48:06","slug":"gaming-the-system-little-tricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hamad.blog\/2020\/04\/28\/gaming-the-system-little-tricks\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaming The System & Little Tricks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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

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<\/a> 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<\/a> almost entirely out of Digg and sold it for a pretty hefty amount back then<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>. 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After that with my co-founders Saad<\/a> and Zeeshan<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Growth hackers study the systems, the AI, find the shortcomings, and capitalize on them. That’s what they are designed to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But some people suggest gamification is a small guy game. A few days ago, PG published this tweet<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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11 yo and his friends are always coming up with ideas for beating the system. I told him that the really big money is not in little tricks like that, but in making things that help people.<\/p>— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 25, 2020<\/a><\/blockquote>