the story of getting banned in facebook (part 2)

So yes. Our Hustle PH app page got banned in Facebook. 

We lost our main customer (Hustler) acquisition channel. Approximately 90% of where we get new Hustlers to answer our surveys and accomplish our tasks.

For a newborn company who is hacking user growth, this is a big dilemma.

Couple this with a sudden interest of big companies for our data, it was a nightmare.

The months spent trying to woo clients like Unilever and Globe Telecom is starting to pay-off. They started emailing us with consumer insights projects they want to run with us, but we do not have enough Hustlers to gather the data from.

Of course we did not give up immediately, we tried different approaches.

1. In-app Referral Programs. Refer a new person to the app, and get a cash reward. The traction was very very slow, a little more expensive, and is a fraud blackhole. It was fraudulent user upon fraudulent user. And as a company that sells data, fraud is our cancer. So we nipped it.

2. Facebook raffle posts. Download the app and get a chance to win PHP500 or some cash reward everyday. But these posts were all organic posts, since we can’t boost with paid advertising (because of the f-ing ban). We had very little uplift, and the existing base of users just kept on winning. We just did not have reach new users organically.

3. Seeding online articles and joining podcasts. A humongous waste of time and money. Our target Hustlers do not read online articles or listen to business podcasts. Our target Hustlers just love facebook. That is it.

The schemes did not work. We had 1 month to finish two projects from our clients and a week already passed. We wasted one precious week by trying things that just did not work.

Then Celina, the head of our marketing had an idea.

“Remember the time we had our first uptick of users?”

“Of course”, I remember answering quite annoyingly. We were in a Gmeet.

“There was a random Youtube influencer who shared our app right? What if we do it again?” She said.

At the back of our heads, a youtube influencer was indeed an option, but we were very uncomfortable doing it. We were uneasy that we could not directly measure attribution and we are afraid to funnel money in something we thought then was just a big gamble.

Celina continued, “yes, we were not able to measure that the growth came from them before, but you cannot question the timing, it must be more than a coincidence.”

I gave a hesitant go signal.

She started contacting influencers, and OMG, these videos are damn expensive. On the average, you need to pay a micro influencer PHP40-50k per video for people who have a couple hundred thousand followers.

We are not funded, and our spending money comes from a very tiny seed fund and revenues from sporadic projects we get from clients.

But we had no other choice - we needed the users. So we tried going the influencer video route.

We found this influencer that somehow has a following aligned to our target customer with a fee that is not so absurd. We contacted YT’s Joseph’s Blessings and Online Jobs Philippines.

My head was still full of skepticism, this is the true scam I thought. PHP50k for a video which I can’t really measure conversion properly? But what other choice?