GoKawiilThere are some contemporary piracy services that run ads—for marketing and, well, advertising purposes. This ranges from PPC to social media campaigns. I opted not to, mostly because I didn't think I could do it tastefully, and because I'd probably attract users who wouldn't be great customers.
Instead, my marketing relied entirely on word-of-mouth—which meant building tremendous trust with my users, plus a single growth hack that I'll describe later on this page.
This is all fairly standard startup knowledge—I've worked with more than a handful of Y Combinator companies and I could apply this to all of them—but it's interesting to see how many parallels existed between what I built and what a "real" startup looks like.
I learned a lot about running a business while operating HeheStreams: customer experience, retention, product design, and the weird parallels between illegal streaming and your typical B2C.
Think of this as a founder postmortem with felony-level customer support.
Lessons from Growing a B2C
noreply@ is absolutely stupid.
I did everything I could to be visible to customers and encouraged them to talk to me any time. That helped build trust in a product sitting in a sea of shady, fly-by-night operations. I ended every email with some variation of "If you need anything, just reply :)".
Get customers started.
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