the story of getting banned in facebook (part 1)

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March last year, Facebook stopped us from posting and banned us from paid advertising.

Reason: our app (Hustle PH) was flagged to be a get rich quick scam, somewhat a clickbait.

Context: our app contains surveys and tasks (ex. take a photo of the shampoo you are currently using), and when our users accomplish a task, we reward them with money transferred to their e-wallet. So our ads in Facebook communicate such, get PHP50 or earn up to PHP1,500 per day etc, this then got flagged by Facebook as scammy.


This sucks because

1. We definitely are not scam. The rewards we give per task are on the average PHP35 or USD0.63. How can you get rich with PHP35?

2. Facebook is our number one advertising channel for our Hustle PH app - since it is the most efficient way, and that point we did not know any better.

3. We just felt like a helpless victim. Why would we get punished while real scam pages (specially those crypto scams) continue to flourish?

Our user acquisition at that time suffered. Before facebook banned us, we had a very clear formula, for roughly every PHP3-5, we get one new user, it was very predictable. Our whole acquisition strategy was built on this structure since it was very straight forward, fast, and somehow manageable cost wise.

Then it all stopped. Just because they thought we were a scam.

We tried reaching out to Facebook, appealing over and over again, and it ended with our ban to post new things lifted. Yay! We could post again. But they came back with a hard left, we can never do paid advertising again.

So that was a big problem. Our biggest source of new users just vanished.

We needed more users in our app because our projects from our clients at that time were also (thank God) started to increase. Without Hustlers (what we call people who use our Hustle PH app) we could not be able to deliver the data needed by our clients.

So then the imbalance started - we had new projects from clients but we did not have enough Hustlers to get the data from. Note that we always brag about our speed, finishing our projects in 4 weeks (vs the industry standard of 2-3 months), so we just did not know how to proceed by then.

We can’t go back to our word from our clients since we are a new company they are still “trying out”. Backing out now would just worsen our brand equity and make us look like unreliable newbies.

We all slept that night with a knot our stomach. Why would sh*t always happen to balance out good things?





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