Came across some stunts @joshk pulled off back in the day for his old company Half(.)com What's interesting is that each one got Half(.)com attention that would have cost many times more to buy but instead they paid for it with effort, mostly by doing things nobody else was willing to do. First they got a town to rename itself. Half(.)com needed its launch to make noise without the budget to buy it. Josh's head of marketing came up with the idea of changing the name of a town in America to Half(.)com. Everyone in the room thought it was crazy, but the audacity is what made it interesting enough to explore. A town renaming itself after a website was unheard of, so of course doing this would result in tons of press. And the town's name became the ad. Every outlet, from the Today Show to 60 Minutes, would have to say "Half(.)com" just to tell the story. The best stunts get mass media coverage organically. Then they had to actually pull it off. They went looking for towns with "half" in the name. Half Moon Bay would have been expensive, so they went smaller. They found a pretty much abandoned town in Oregon called Halfway. And since it was a small town, it was more likely to care about what a startup could offer. Their head of marketing was on a plane to meet the mayor the next day. The deal itself is a funny story. Half(.)com wanted the rename to be permanent and was willing to pay more for it, but the town would only agree to a year. So they built the deal around what the town needed: 20 computers for the school, four local customer service jobs, and a snowplow. What got the one-year deal over the line was donating the snowplow. To pull off an iconic stunt, the deal takes as much creativity as the idea. The result was a four-minute Today Show segment, the Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes. Josh said they got tens of millions of dollars in free media. In 2000, eBay bought Half(.)com for around $350M. A renamed town didn't sell the company on its own, but it gave a brand-new startup awareness incumbents were paying tens of millions for. If that idea had just gotten laughed out of the room, I could argue that they never would have seen that level of success. Another stunt is when they had the audacity to plaster ads on urinal guards in bathrooms. Internet World was the big trade show at the time, so it was the place to get in front of their ICP. It was also where ads were crazy expensive. The people Half(.)com wanted to reach there were the internet industry, and at the time that crowd was, in Josh's words, "all male." So the one placement that reached almost every attendee was the men's room, at a moment they had nothing else to look at. So they printed urinal guards that said "don't piss away half your money." Then they gave interns gloves and had them place the guards guerrilla style in the urinals at the venue. No company in their right mind would think of an idea like this, because who wants to ask their interns to do that? Half(.)com saw the mispriced attention and exploited something nobody else would dare bid on. Their bet was that nobody's job was to take the guards out, and they were right. The guards stayed up for a year and a half. The whole thing cost about $2K. Their final big bet is that they made fortune cookies more effective than a NYT ad. The New York Times Book Review was where everyone went to find out about books, so it was the obvious place for Half(.)com to advertise. But an ad there cost $50K, and per Josh nobody read it. It reminds me of billboards in SF right now. They're so oversaturated that nobody looks at them anymore, and people actively hate seeing AI slop billboards. Half(.)com's answer was to create its own ad real estate. They were talking about this over Chinese food when the fortune cookies came out at the end of the meal, and Josh's head of marketing pointed out that everybody reads them. The next day he went to a fortune cookie maker in Brooklyn. Nobody there spoke English, so he came back the day after with a translator and asked how much they made off the lucky numbers. Before Half(.)com came along, the cookie maker was making nothing off the lucky numbers side, across about 2M cookies a week sold to Chinese restaurants on the East Coast. So he offered them $10 for every redeemed coupon code printed on the back: "Save a fortune at Half(.)com." About a week later, they were on millions of fortune cookies. The least flashy of the three might be the best business. It was attention nobody had priced, in a spot people read every time. The ad was disguised as the fortune. And because Half(.)com paid per redemption, the cookie maker had a reason to say yes and Half(.)com only paid for customers it actually got. Josh says it became one of their biggest acquisition channels for years. Josh's takeaway for founders was "rate card is for suckers," meaning only suckers pay the sticker price media outlets charge for ad space. A full-page ad cost around $50K. The urinal guards cost $2K. People get really creative building a product and then really traditional on marketing. Losers play it safe. Instead of spending stupid money, Half(.)com spent: 1. a next-day flight to Oregon to pitch a mayor 2. interns in gloves placing ads on urinals 3. a trip to a cookie factory with a translator Most companies justify paying the posted price for attention partly because their time is expensive and every idea has to survive a meeting. But the best teams pay in work nobody else wants to do, and get the same attention for a fraction of the cost. That's even more true now that AI has made the growth playbook easy to copy. Everyone ends up bidding on the same tactics, and today's version of that $50K full-page ad is a polished launch video with a wall of paid quote tweets, which costs a lot and makes you look like every other launch that week. Nobody was bidding on a town's name or the back of a fortune. That's what mispriced attention looks like: inventory nobody thinks of as ad space, usually because it's too weird or too much work to get. It's why I think stunts are the next wave for startup launches. Winners take creative risks. Stories told on @mikeeisenberg's pod.

I do believe for stunts to work, they should be novel and provocative. It’s supposed to engender an emotion response. But this one was executed poorly. Why? MESSAGING MATTERS. If you want to lean in to the provocative side, figure out who your ICP hates, and rage bait them. In pissing off their opps, you’ll motivate the people who you actually want to root for you.

Forget creative freedom. The early GTM hire doesnt work anymore. The incentives make no sense for this person to join a company. You're not competing with other startups for these ppl. You're competing with the option of them building the company themselves.

If you truly are what is described here, then you should in fact be unemployable.

Put the tokens in the bag.

Our intern spent the whole launch video budget on an homage to @elonmusk... are we cooked chat?

world models is so yesterday whos building universe models?

Like if you got a finger on fn rn

Getting rich used to come down to how effective you were at pressing buttons on a keyboard. Now it comes down to how oratorical you are.

the center of the universe

Been on this shit more than half my life

I only talk to people who are legible to AI

this is genuinely terrifying...

Even at 1hp with the storm closing in, you can still deal 200 damage.