Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I targeted the Reddit CEO with Facebook ads to get an interview at Reddit

twicsy-blog.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 108 posts

Re: How I targeted the Reddit CEO with Facebook ads to get an interview at Reddit

#41

Post by AndrewKemendo »

dumbfounder wrote: post #39
0xfeba wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many years have you been at this? How do/did you learn the more architectural problem solving skills? I ask because I am pretty skilled technically, but only down in the weeds. Reading your blog post about the two techniques and how to combine them, I can understand, but I would not come up with this myself.

Nearly 20 years. I learned by attempting to do things that were kind of ridiculous. Like building a large scale general web search engine with hundreds of millions of pages (that was a lot in 2004) using 30+ servers in my townhouse. Go build something ambitious and you will learn how to put it all together!

I'm curious then, do you know on what basis they made the decision that you did not have enough experience?

Re: How I targeted the Reddit CEO with Facebook ads to get an interview at Reddit

#44

Post by citrablue »

bawana wrote: post #25
gwern wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just makes it more expensive! How much would you pay for your dream job or a new lead? A few hundred or thousand dollars would be chump change to a lot of people.

my ignorance and naivete are really annoying me. How do you write an ad to 'target' a person? How do you personalize spam??

If you have an infinite budget, I could 'target' you by purchasing every ad on the internet with the copy "hi bawana, click this link!"

Nearly every impression would be seen by the wrong person, but a few of the impressions would be seen by you.

The rest of the exercise is figuring out how to segment the audience based on whether it's likely/unlikely that you're in the segment. If I know you're from the US and live in California, I can geo-target to that region.

Re: How I targeted the Reddit CEO with Facebook ads to get an interview at Reddit

#45

Post by schoen »

fluxic wrote: post #16

I did this with the CEO of Breather. Back then, you could target based off of employer, job description, school, and interests. You could also make these target options mutually exclusive—which, in the case of Breather CEO Julien Smith—meant an audience of 1. My unlisted Medium post got 1 read. Felt like a damn king when it worked. Cost me (I shit you not) 20 cents to pull off. Epilogue: I quoted him too high, and di…

I feel like Chris Soghoian (or maybe Ashkan Soltani) also did this in the same timeframe with Google executives when he wanted to lobby them individually about policy issues—but I didn't immediately find a reference to it. (But I think it was the same method, like targeting attorneys at Google who had a certain combination of almae matres.)

Re: How I targeted the Reddit CEO with Facebook ads to get an interview at Reddit

#46

Post by Abhishek41783 »

fluxic wrote: post #16

I did this with the CEO of Breather. Back then, you could target based off of employer, job description, school, and interests. You could also make these target options mutually exclusive—which, in the case of Breather CEO Julien Smith—meant an audience of 1. My unlisted Medium post got 1 read. Felt like a damn king when it worked. Cost me (I shit you not) 20 cents to pull off. Epilogue: I quoted him too high, and di…

Could you share the Link to your medium post please :)

Re: How I targeted the Reddit CEO with Facebook ads to get an interview at Reddit

#48

Post by whymauri »

dumbfounder wrote: post #14
rdiddly wrote: post #10

So 2 years later and he's not with Reddit anymore. Are we not supposed to ask about that part? Sounds like this wasn't exactly a success story.

I didn't end up working for Reddit. I wanted the head of search position that was open, but they thought I didn't have enough experience. We talked about an IC role, but I would have had to move to the SF area (I live in DC) as they didn't allow remote employees. I couldn't justify uprooting my family (wife and 3 little kids) to move to a more expensive part of the country for less money than I can make in DC, even w…

What is an IC role?

Re: How I targeted the Reddit CEO with Facebook ads to get an interview at Reddit

#49

Post by propogandist »

bawana wrote: post #25
gwern wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just makes it more expensive! How much would you pay for your dream job or a new lead? A few hundred or thousand dollars would be chump change to a lot of people.

my ignorance and naivete are really annoying me. How do you write an ad to 'target' a person? How do you personalize spam??

modem ad technology can do it... your mastercard and visa purchase behavior, for example, is available for purchase. That data can be merged with other purchased data, and things like aggregated browsing behavior. This is all done to serve people who may be in my target audience with (semi) personalized ads. The ad may not appeal to you, so it gets classified as spam.

Re: How I targeted the Reddit CEO with Facebook ads to get an interview at Reddit

#50

Post by swyx »

ronilan wrote: post #37
prokes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more: he concludes with "P.S. I am out again looking for new opportunities". So besides being excellent at putting his work in front of his target audience, he may go 2 for 2 on the job front.

Chris got Steve's attention but never worked at reddit[1], Nina got Brian's attention[2] but never worked at Airbnb[3] and Feross got Chad's attention[4] but never worked at YouTube[5] even though TechCrunch jumped to report he accepted the job[6]. None of them was actually ever offered one. Make what you want of it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110763 [2] https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/590561521576…

not sure what to make of it to be honest. they showed resourcefulness, which is good. but there's more to being a good employee at that. esp at a startup beyond a certain scale.
Post reply on HN