How to Contact Anyone on LinkedIn with the Co-Founder of Vungle - Hustle Con 2015

Hey guys, you alright? Great to be back at HustleCon. So basically, for me, hustling means finding out the rules of the game that you're playing and then how to break them and put them in your favor. Now, today I'm gonna talk about advertising, but you can apply this stuff to pretty much anything. It's just a way of thinking. So the reason that I'm gonna be talking about advertising today is because a few years ago, I pulled off my biggest hustle, and it got quite a lot of press, but I'd never really talked before about kind of how I did that. So I wanted to talk today about that. And so this story starts, just me and my business partner at Vungle. We were in a tiny office in London, just us two and like 3 interns. And one day I was just reading TechCrunch, and I saw this story saying, "Hey, there's this incubator in San Francisco called AngelPad, and they're giving every company that joins $100,000." And at the bottom it said, and there's one spot left for somebody reading this article. So I said to my business partner, I was like, "Hey, man, imagine what we could do with $100,000. We should apply." And he was like, "Nah, man, there's no point," because we looked at their Twitter account, and they were saying, "Oh, we just got 2,000 applications in the last 24 hours." And so he was like, "We'll just get lost in the noise." But I was like, "Come on, at least let's give it a shot." And so we had this objective, get into AngelPad, but they were telling us the way to do it is to submit an application. We might as well have just thrown it in the trash. It's not going to get seen amongst 2,000 people. We had to find a way to stand out. So what we did is we looked, OK, who's the guy running the incubator? And there's this guy called Tomas. And so we started to think, "All right, how can we get his attention?" So we had the objective, and now we had this clear goal. All right, how do we get Thomas's attention? And I'm going to deviate from the story a bit now, because if I'm listening to a talk, if I'm reading a book, I want to know— I don't want to just hear the story, because that can often be embellished a bit. I want to hear the exact steps, like what did someone actually do this scenario. And so hopefully, I can kind of take you into my head, what I was thinking at that time. So, alright. My goal is get on Tomas's radar. Having that goal, and then the first step— so as I said, you can apply this thinking to whatever. If you've got a goal, you can apply this thinking to whatever. For me, I was like, alright, gotta get his attention. And the way I'm gonna do it, I chose to use LinkedIn advertising. I chose this because, you know, LinkedIn is not as big as Google or Facebook, so potentially there might be more ways to exploit it, because it's not as established. And also, you know, my audience is there, he's a user of LinkedIn. So once I've chosen the game, if you like, I've gotta find out the rules of the game. And then how I can break them. So if you've never seen a LinkedIn ad before, basically, like, when you're browsing LinkedIn, you've got these ads on the right side of the page that come up, a bit like Google AdWords. And so the first set of rules I had to learn about was, what are the rules of this ad unit? And now, I just, like, love breaking stuff. I love breaking websites. I should have been a QA tester, probably. So, I just— the way I found out the rules is I just typed in random shit into the text boxes and see what you can do with it. And so I found the rules that basically you had to have a title, less than 25 characters, an image, like 50 pixels by 50 pixels, and a short description. Now, a bonus, I didn't actually use this kind of loop hole, but actually you could set the name as who the advert was from, from anyone. So if you wanted, you could make an ad looking like it came from Google. That was just a loophole, I didn't use that. And so the next set of rules was, alright, you create, you've got your advert, and then the next set of rules is about how you target your ad. Now LinkedIn lets you do some really cool stuff. You can target by the company that someone's at, and the job title, And basically, as you layer on this more specific targeting, you see that number on the right, it shows you how many people are going to see your ad. So me being me, and as I said, you want to find out what are the rules, I tried running an ad just targeting super specific. So just job title CEO, company Vungle. So we're targeting a person of one. OK? So that number on the right said 1. But it didn't let you do that. It says, like, you know, you've got to target your ad to more people. You're not targeting enough people. So I added one more company. So now I'm targeting the CEO of Bungle or AOL. So that's 2 people. But it's still saying, you know, that's not a big enough set. So I added one more company. And that's too small. One more. Nope. And so now we've got Microsoft and Apple in there as well, so that's 5. and then keep laying on. So now it's targeting 6, and I was saying it's not enough. I'm not sure how much time we've got, but I wanted to keep— I want to keep going through this because this is the process that I went through, so I want to— I want you guys to see as well. We're going to find out the rules. So targeting 7 people now. Okay, what the hell? It accepted it. So now we know the rules that we can target 7 people is the minimum number of people you need to run an ad on LinkedIn. I don't know why they chose that number. Maybe nobody had actually done this process before. But for me, having found out this, what that meant is I now knew how to target down to an individual person. Because what I could do is I could target, hey, the exact person, let's say the CEO of Vungle, and then what I could do is I could just add in random people that probably are not even going to see my ad. Let's say, like, Bank of China or Mexican TV studio or something. Like, I'd have my person I want, and then, like, 6 randomers that I don't really care. And so the next bit was how to pay for your ad. Now, LinkedIn, they recommended to pay per person that clicks the ad. They recommended paying, like, $8. But the thing is, because I'm only targeting 7 people, it made sense to actually pay on the other option they give, which is CPM, to pay per 1,000 impressions. I'm targeting 7 people. And so, um, they suggest that I bid $2.52 per 1,000 people. So that's what I'm gonna go with. And the last set of rules is the review process. So basically, when you submit an ad on LinkedIn, it basically says, 'Hey, we're going to review your ad. It'll take 24 hours and we'll get back to you.' And, um, some of the times when I submitted an ad, they, they rejected it. But what I found out is because you submit it and then they take 24 hours, it was a manual process. So what that meant is I could just submit exactly the same ad and someone else the next day would review it, and then often it went through. And also, sometimes they didn't like, like, if I was linking to a different website. They might say, like, "Hey, we don't like what you're linking to," you know? So what I did is I used a URL shortener. So I kind of put up the ad linking to one page, and then once they manually approved it, I just changed where that link was pointing to, so it pointed somewhere else. Now, when you're finding out the rules and stuff, it's also important to know the risks. You know, of trying to play the game. And so, you know, I didn't do anything illegal, not too illegal, and the main risk for me was that my account could have got banned. So just the precaution I took against that was just using— I just created a fake account to be testing with, you know. Now, I'm going to jump back to the story now. So just to remind you, I had been in London, just me and my business partner, tiny office. And we'd seen this TechCrunch article that there's one spot left. And so we needed to get Tomas, the guy that's running it. How can we get his attention? So using these bits I found, what I did is I created an advert on LinkedIn with a picture of his face. So— This, this fits in with doing the rules. It's a 50 by 50 picture, it's a title less than 75 characters. And then what I did is, because I can now have this ability to target down to an individual person, I target it to him and people connected to him. So his colleagues, his investor, different investors, etc. And so basically I'd seen this TechCrunch post on Thursday, and I basically— yes, I read this post, said to my business partner, like, "Hey man, we should apply," and then just kind of quickly hacked together this ad campaign that same day. And so basically, if you were browsing LinkedIn that day and you're connected to Mars, you'd see a picture of his face on the side of the screen, and when you click it, it took you to a landing page. This was a video that we just did in one take. So I just pulled out my phone, I just started filming my business partner. So I was like, 'Okay, my business partner, phone, we just do this in one take.' And I was like, 'Pitch into the phone, why do we deserve this last spot?' So basically, when you land on this page and click play, it's me and my business partner, we're talking directly to Tomas. Like, 'Tomas, in your background, you're a legend. We deserve this last spot. We won't let you down. This is my phone number, this is my email address. Give me a call.' And so this was Thursday. I kind of just went to sleep and forgot about it. And the next day I just got this short email. Oh, sorry. And so basically had a phone call with him, and because he said, "Hey, can we have a call?" So had this call and he was like, "Hey, okay, so I've seen your video." 'You got my attention, it's cool, but take it down now.' He's like, 'Everyone is calling me about this.' He said he'd been on a flight from New York to San Francisco. He hadn't had email access. So he just got off his flight, and he's checking his iPhone. He had over 20 emails from people, basically like, 'Dude, have you seen this video? Like, these kids really want to talk to you.' Now, basically, so we had this phone call on the Friday, and then, basically, the next week, we had another Skype call, and then he basically said, "Alright guys, I've decided who's got the last spot. Let's have a final Skype call." And we were like, "Man, like, we've got our team here. Do you have to reject us on video? Can't you just, like, phone us to reject us?" And he's like, "No, let's do a final Skype call." And so we had this call, and he's like, "All right, guys, I've decided to take a risk. You guys have got the last spot." So we're, like, high-fiving around the office, and he's like, "OK, but if you take this last spot, you've got to move to America permanently, because I've invested in some companies before where they just go straight back to their own country, and, you know, the investors don't like it and stuff." So we were like, "Yep, that's fine. We'll move to America." And— So we'd seen the ad on Thursday. This was the next Thursday. And he's like, "Alright, that's great. Well, it starts on Monday. So just get the first flight out here." So that's basically how I end up in America. Now, the best thing about this ad is potentially how much it cost. So this is— as I said, I ran some targeting his friends, but one targeting Tomas cost 1 cent. Because I was paying per 1,000 impressions. 5 people saw it, 2 people clicked it, and that was Tomas, so that cost 1 cent. Now, just to show that this wasn't kind of just luck, just some other examples of how I used this hack. I was just reading an article that Color at the time had just raised like $40 million, so we're like, "Okay, can we target the CEO of Color and do something?" So, all right, objective, target the CEO of Bill, is Bill. And so we ran an ad with Bill's face on it, targeting people. And then got an email from Bill as well. He's like, "Hey, I've seen your ad. We've got an ad agent," because we were doing ad videos at the time. So he's like, "We've already got an agency, but," 'You know, we'll try and— let's see if we can slot you in.' And he introduced me to his team, and that cost $2.78 to get to Bill. And then Rovio, you know, it's a big mobile gaming company, so we're like, 'All right, can we contact Rovio's CEO?' He's called Michael Head. Now, we didn't get to Michael directly, but we got one of the VPs of Rovio sent us an email saying, like, 'Hey guys, our ad, and we started talking to them, and that cost $3.24. And then we were like, alright, what about Spotify? Can we get them as a client? And so we just put up an ad saying, I want Spotify as a client. And, and then, yeah, got an email from Spotify saying, hey, you guys got our attention. And we actually got Spotify as a client, but That one was a bit more expensive. That was $16. Okay. So, to summarize, this was the different steps I took. Now, there's no point— we can't all in the audience, like, recreate step for step this advertising bit, otherwise they'll definitely ban us all. And, you know, that was a while ago, so LinkedIn have changed their systems, but hopefully you can kind of use those philosophies to hack whatever system you're coming up to, whether that's applying for a job. You know, if you've got a job, they tell you, "Just submit a job application." You might as well just throw your CV in the trash. Like, that's not gonna get people's attention. The way that you do this is by looking at what's your objective, what's the game that I'm playing, and then finding out the rules of the game and how to break them. So this isn't just limited to LinkedIn advertising. I kind of take this thinking into lots of stuff that I do. And so these are my contact details, and I'd love to hear how you guys kind of use this thinking and what kind of hacks you come up with. Thanks a lot. So I don't know if anyone had any questions. Thanks, Jack. If you have any questions, please come to the front. Hey.

Great talk. I was just wondering if you had any other stories of something you've hacked in a similar manner.

Any other hacks? Yes, so, well, I've done some other hacks, but like, idea hacks I have that I haven't tried yet, because I haven't had an objective, would be Facebook advertising is quite interesting, because what you can do is you can target people by email address. So you can upload like a list of email addresses. So you could think how you could use that thinking with Facebook, because what you do is you just have the one email address of who you wanna target, and it's a load of junk email addresses that you don't care about. So then, it's how do I get that one individual? I also kind of use this kind of thinking for, like, Amazon. So, when I'm doing stuff, like, my account got banned on Amazon. And so, because I, like, buy so much stuff, and then I return it. And so, I just, like, if I wanted to buy, like, a pair of headphones, what I'd do is just buy, like, the top 10 selling headphones on Amazon, try all 10, and then return 9. Uh, they didn't really like that. But so basically, the way with Amazon, what I did is I found the rules of Amazon. How do they see an account? And so basically what I did is I found basically a way to be undetected on Amazon, which is, uh, you can set up like a virtual computer. So I'm using another computer that has different email address, um, and a different IP address, etc. Uh, you— there's ways you can like mask your phone number, and then you just buy a ver— you, you know those gift cards you buy at like Safeway and stuff? Then obviously they can't track you back to your credit card. So basically it's just finding out the rules of the game. How does Amazon track you? It's your credit card, it's your phone number, it's your address, and it's your IP address and stuff. So How do we break those rules? Credit card, get like a gift card so they can't track you. Phone number, you can use something like Twilio, it's really cheap. Email, you can just use a fake email address. Address, I just change the address a bit. Yeah, and so the same with Netflix. Netflix gives you like a 30-day or 60-day trial, so, but it's limited by the address. So what I'd do is, So say I'm 123 Fourth Street. I just do 123 Fourth Street, unit A, unit B, unit C. And so you just keep getting a free trial. Awesome. Thanks so much. Hi. Have you ever done a hack on somebody and really made them mad and wished you hadn't because there were negative consequences? Uh, well, yes. So doing that LinkedIn advertising, um, again, part of the bit that I said in there is knowing the risks. So if I'm doing these hacks, I've at least got to know the risks that I'm going through. So one, we targeted, um, a dating website like Match.com, and we used their logo and targeting it, and we got like a cease and desist letter, and they also emailed LinkedIn a bit. But what we did is Again, it's not any risk. Like, cease and desist, they're not— it's highly unlikely they're gonna sue you unless you, like, really annoy them, you know? So we just took it, alright, they've sent us cease and desist, they took down our ad, but then we actually kind of just turned it back on the lawyer. We were like, no, dude, this is only people targeting at your company, it's not to the public. Can you intro us to someone else on your team who does BD instead of— and then they did. I think it's just about knowing the risks and not pushing it too far. You just got to know the risks of what you're doing and just knowing if you can take on those risks and not going so far that it has negative consequences. Thanks. Hey, man. Hey, Jake.

I have a question. What if you want to get into some program, but you have no idea who's the organizer? You know nobody there, and you cannot find all the emails. You just don't know anything, like who is running this thing. What you can do to hack?

I mean, you should be able to find out something about them. I didn't know Tomas's email address or anything. I just went on Crunchbase, saw that TechCrunch, the article, said, hey, Tomas is running it. I think it would be quite rare that you can't at least find the name of someone doing it. Like, 500 Startups, you'd see Dave McClure. Like, Y Combinator, Sam Altman. You can just, like, what you do is you just Google the thing and see what people are mentioned as being involved with it, you know? Like, that's what we did, is just reading different tech press and stuff.

Okay, thank you.

Guess I wanted to kind of add on that last question. Sometimes just physical surveillance, tracking someone down, meeting them on the street is the best way to do it. You know, find out where corporate headquarters is, walk up.

Hey! Okay, yeah, fair enough. I'll try that one next time.

So I'm sure you use many tools to help you with these hacking. What would you say are your top 3 tools? Like, what plugin that allows you to track when emails are opened, stuff like that?

So Twilio. Can be quite off-putting, because when they put out the ads, they're like, "Hey, talk to your developer," or something about it. But it's actually quite simple to use, like, once you get started. And so Twilio's really cool for just— basically, how I use Twilio as well is, you know when you sign up to stuff online, and then they ask for your phone number? Sometimes it requires your phone number. And then, just, you get these random cold calls from advertisers, like, later on. Basically, I use Twilio. I basically set up a number, and it just goes straight to voicemail. So whenever I'm signing up for something, I just put in my Twilio number, and it will go straight to voicemail. So it doesn't bother me at all, you know. So I like Twilio. Boomerang for Gmail is like the main tool that I love, because you can like schedule what time an email goes and stuff. There's one called Mailtrack, which is just, it's kind of like WhatsApp for email. Like, it shows when they opened the emails and stuff. There's lots of different ones that I like. I use Product Hunt quite a lot, so find different tools and stuff on there.

Awesome, thanks.

Thanks. We have time for one more question if anyone has one. Where do you get your t-shirts? I'd like to say Teespring, because he's speaking a bit later, but he's not. But I could basically— they could probably run their whole business just off me. I have quite a lot of t-shirts.

Cool, thanks for the talk. So I was wondering on the conversion rate of a successful hack, when you choose an objective and a weapon of choice, how many times do you go in learning the risks and the game rules of the game, and then you can't figure out a way to game the system?

I mean, for me, yeah, LinkedIn ads, I wasn't really expecting to find that breakthrough, you know? Like, it was just messing around with it. I think it's kind of thinking about, something that you could apply to other stuff. Like the LinkedIn advertising, I was able to use it with Tomas because I'd already been experimenting with it before. So I think it's good if you can— the way I do it is I just target systems that I could use more than once, you know? Like, I wouldn't find a hack specific to AngelPad. I'd be target— I'd just be playing around with different systems. And then, even if I don't have an objective, at that time, just by playing around, then if I see something come up, you know, I saw that ad, and in the same day, I could create the ad campaign. So I think by targeting kind of general bits, like, I'd be interested in messing around more with, like, Facebook ads, and all these different other ad products that come up, you know? That's what I'd think is, like, some general—

Just a quick add-on question. How much of your free time do you spend learning about systems?

Well, it's procrastinating, isn't it? So that's what I do. I just mess around on the internet.

Thank you very much.

Bye, lot. Thanks. Great. Thank you.