I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: I’m really proud of my most recent app, Too Phishy. It’s by far the best anti-phishing add-on I’ve seen in the Google Workspace store. That being said, it hasn’t caught on as much as I would have hoped or as fast as I would have hoped.
In an effort to build one app per month, I have to be more ruthless than other app builders in terms of timing. Things have to take off fast, or it’s time to pivot. So I’ve decided to pivot into new ventures. Here’s my blog post explaining why.
I'm trying to built momentum for my Gmail add-on, Too Phishy, by sharing my launch blog post on HN. Unfortunately, I've posted it 3 times already and they've all bombed:
* "I built an anti-phishing app. Here's what I learned (and why I hate Stripe)."
* "The highs and lows of building an anti-phishing app"
* "Launching Too Phishy"
My friend suggested giving my post the title "Phishing for Compliments." So let's see what happens.
Why didn’t WhatsApp’s growth slow in 2014, when Facebook acquired WhatsApp? Or in 2016 when WhatsApp started sharing user data with Facebook? Why was one privacy notification enough to send away hundreds of millions of users?
Ah, now I realize where the Malicious Software ban was coming from -- as you say, there was no plugin that could actually be malware-scanned. Makes sense. Thanks for the (perhaps obvious but not to me) insight.
Most people's idea of the ad marketplace is not unlike that of a person that believes that they could rewrite Twitter in a weekend. Reality is orders of magnitude more complicated than it appears.
The easiest shortcut to expand one's mind is to see how everyone could commit fraud. So for advertisement, the click could be fraudulent, the website owner could be fraudulent, the ad buyer could be malicious, and the ad network could be misrepresenting reality to any/all comers. It gets even better when you consider the intermediaries between most merchant and placing ads, as they tend to talk to different ad people to help make the ads, place the ads, and have an ad strategy: None of those extra steps are clean of fraud or incompetence.
Now design a working system that is remotely resistant to the different sources of fraud that every party could be committing, all with minimal human-to-human contact, as many of the steps involve interactions where at least one side is completely uninterested in talking to a human on the other side, as that would cut profits.
The end result is probably not going to be all that much cleaner than the current situation, which is optimized for nobody. It's just a little less unoptimized for Google and Facebook, because they are a bigger player than anyone else mentioned.Still they also have to start from the perspective that every interaction they might have with a smaller player could involve fraud.
Maybe Google doesn’t really want anyone advertising on its platform because all its revenue is faked. The whole thing is a darpa nsa information vacuuming operation.
As a coder with a side hustle, I tried using FB ads a few years back. I had a niche product targeting a very specific demographic (K-12 teachers in the US). My business' page got tons of new followers from people not in education and not in the US. We spent hundreds of dollars and didn't get a single valid customer that I'm aware of.
I don't think FB is any better than Google, but I also think online ads mostly exist to keep marketers in business.
>I don't think FB is any better than Google, but I also think online ads mostly exist to keep marketers in business.
I have similar views. Large companies with marketing/advertising budgets have to spend that money. If you're in that department, you have to be able to show people how effective you are. Digital ads make that super easy with all of the nice little graphs and charts. The only problem is, their is no way of actually knowing their accuracy. They just look impressive. The fact that we have brand awareness campaigns vs promoting specific products just shows that the only metric they really care about is how much money they can spend while FB/Googs gladly take it all.
I agree. When running my Google Campaign, I noticed on a Thursday that my total impression count for the month had actually gone down since the day before. And my campaign had launched that Monday midway through the month so it wasn't a 30 day cutoff that explained the total impression count for the month going down.
I think the impression counts are calculated using a finger to the air...
I've tried to run facebook ads for a non-profit lately, and damn they make it hard to give them money. It might be that our "page" is in a weird state, but it's just impossible to figure out how to set things up.
Like, there are so many portals. Ad stuff in facebook itself, the adsmanager web page, the facebook business page. And they all look different based on if you're acting on behalf of yourself or your "page". And some things you can only do on one of those three sites, and only if acting as the correct user. And you have to constantly switch between them to get anything done. Add a spending account on your private profile (for some reason..), then verify as your page, then submit ID as yourself, then create the ad as your page, then have it not be verified but only show in one of the three sites the button on how to fix it etc etc.
Just insane. If I weren't technical and stubborn I would never have figured it out. No idea how small businesses can give them money and not outright be scammed.
Facebook ads are like 90% scams. I don't even understand how any of them get accepted. It's also night and day difference from Instagram which is also owned by Meta, I don't get it.
Languages: Python, Java, Ruby, JavaScript (+ES6)
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Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiastepanek/
Tech blog: penloop.io
Email: lydia <at> penloop.io
Experience: 10 years
Location: New York, NY
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