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This is also a great way to surprise people.

Surprise seems to be one of the most important ingredients to getting things to spread (I won't quote the academic or anecdotal research of that here.) So I use this inversion analysis often in thinking about coming up with ways of surprising people. My most successful example of this:

I was originally thinking, "How can I get more customers?"

Inverting it I came up with, "How can I lose more customers?" (A different inversion from the OP's but an inversion nonetheless).

Using that as my base I came up with this funny campaign where I tried to figure out how to fire more of my customers. What if I could fire the worst of my customers. So I invented a honey pot website called trickajournalist.com where I described some software you could signup for to spam journalists. And then I used the list of people who signed up for that and banned them from using my product that had an email newsletter component. We didn't want spammers.

It was a nice media/traffic win for what we were doing. And it all came from inverting what we originally struggled to answer.

P.S. If you're interested more in the whole trickajournalist.com thing, the original site is dead now, but some articles about it:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/02/27/trick-a...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/03/08/reddit-...

2 comments

So you lied to a bunch of people? While enticing them to participate in bad behaviour? I don't get the joke

This was definitely a point of debate before and during this. Honeypots are by definition a deceit. Whether they are a net positive we may have to disagree on. I think in many cases they are a positive as in this case.

Spam is out of control. After we launched our bulk email tools, we immediately saw bad actors. So this was one novel attempt at filtering them out. If someone were awful enough to signup for a tool that had the copy and intent of the trickajournalist.com website had, they shouldn't be using our email tool. We didn't publicly shame them or make their lives any worse than they might already be. They just couldn't use our tool.

Maybe I'm not understanding, but I thought these are not professional spammers. More like people not happy with journalists that you enticed to behave badly. A minor form of entrapment.

People who sign up for both TrickAJournalist.com, and the Highrise CRM tool (GP's software), are very likely professional spammers, looking for whatever bulk-emailing software they can get.

There's no negative consequence to just signing up for TrickAJournalist; only a negative consequence for attempting to sign up for Highrise while already having signed up for TrickAJournalist.

Someone who just literally wants to "trick a journalist", once, might sign up for TrickAJournalist; but such a person has no reason to also to use that same email address to sign up for the B2B CRM software Highrise.

Someone who wants to send knowingly-spammy bulk emails while purposefully dodging spam filters, would sign up for TrickAJournalist (which claims to be exactly for that); and also would sign up for Highrise, since it has bulk emailing capabilities and likely also has positive spam-filter cachet from all the legitimate uses other companies put it to.

Thanks, this clears some things for me. I guess trick a journalist was mostly geared towards spammers.

As an aside, the main reason I didnt follow these links and find out for myself is because this is in part satire but mostly a marketing scheme to advertise Highrise. Sorry, I dislike these sort of tricks, it makes me feel manipulated. And I prefer not to add my traffic to such endeavours.

And come on, spam is hardly an unnoticed issue which one meeds to raise awareness for.

"spam is hardly an unnoticed issue which one meeds to raise awareness for" - I thought so too. Until I tried to run a bulk email service. We had a countless number of people, good people, sending spam, not realizing it's spam. There's a ton of awareness that needs to be raised to email senders what spam is. There's also awareness that needs to be brought to the attention of developers creating email tools. They will be and might already be misused in ways you are probably not protecting for today. During this phase I also saw some very elite developers (not on Highrise) go through some "we've been hit by spammers and we never predicted they'd use our tool to do this". I could go on an on how we should still be educating ourselves on how to fight this and what I learned even being an experienced operator.

> There's a ton of awareness that needs to be raised to email senders what spam is.

Someone should create something like Grammarly or Medium's community-editor feature, for email campaigns. "Before you hit send, get a first impression on your campaign from 10 random beta readers from our community." Then give the beta-readers a prominent "this looks like spam" button to press.

Probably it wouldn't give any different of a response than a regular spam filter; but I imagine that most ad people will think of "it went into the spam filter" as a technical problem, rather than a problem with their messaging. Whereas, if real humans tell them the campaign looks like spam, maybe they'd listen.

Since Highrise doesn't take new signups (for the last two years actually), it was just a fun story

I doesn't seem like a joke to me. It seems like a sincere way to filter out bad actors.

...by being a bad actor yourself? I'm with the parent poster, I don't get it.

Context matters.

A bad actor towards spammers and a bad actor towards your legitimate customers are not the same thing.

A bad actor towards spammers, is being a good actor towards their legitimate customers.

Thank you for taking the time to respond instead of just downvoting. However, this is an Ends Justifies the Means argument, which I have always disagreed with and also disagree with here.

OP description seemed like it was mainly a gimmick for him to get media attention at the expanse of other people.

I think the original site might make it more clear. But the forbes article might help: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/02/27/trick-a...

"Treating journalists like suckers" or "stalking them" isn't the same demographic as "folks who are disgruntled with journalists".

And really, what "expense"? They weren't outed. They lost nothing but possible future use of an email tool we produced (we found no current users signing up for trickajournalist.com).

And as for the intent of the site. It was a lot of things. But first and foremost it was to raise an awareness of how bad email has become. People are doing awful things with email. All the automation, cold email targeting, etc. I wanted to put some satire out so maybe some folks operating sites might take pause at what they're offering, and who they're offering it to. I wanted to raise a novel method of how to deal with things like this. I wanted to raise how easy it is to promote awful tools like this was even when ads are supposed to be human moderated on a lot of places.

Did it actually work?

What was the yield on that?