tech-company, marketing, website, customer-serviceDuring the early stage of a website that is reliant on the website seeming well used with a large number of concurrent users online, would it be “okay” to fake those numbers?
Take a dating site as an example, you would not use one that you can tell is new with a low population, but you would if it had a seemingly large or average amount of users.
Is it ethical to create 100,000 user account or profiles in this case to boost the numbers to draw real people?
I understand that without the fake profiles actually doing anything or in this case replying to message sent to them by real people that the real people may not stick around for very long, but at least you had that user on-board and overtime as the real people start to grow in numbers that will become less of an issue.
That basically boils down to is it ethical to lie. Which is fairly universally considered unethical in most circumstances. Of course in business some degree of advertising lying is normal (not saying it is ethical but the skirting the edge of honesty in advertising is quite normal).
Aside from being unethical it may also be counterproductive; many users may be more likely to leave due to no answers than you would have lost to the correct impression that you have a low user base. Also if it comes out you’ll likely have a major negative image problem.
The vast majority of startups use at least one form of lying - using language in a way that encourages readers to draw the implication that there’s a big team or/and user base or/and content repository. Or take the way Jess Farmer of Global Corporate Enterprise Consulting Solutions Group always says, “we” when she’s the whole of the organisation.
In truth it’s not a knock-down question either way. Neither “no, you should never say anything that would lead someone to the wrong conclusion!” nor “yes, everybody does it, so get out there and lie to your heart’s content!” works out.
So you do need some kind of ethical framework. For me, the area that’s at least in the gray zone is where the underlying promise is backed by a solid and realistic intent to deliver. If “Yes, we have 24/7 support,” means “Yes, if you sign up, we’ll create a 24/7 support service,” then that’s what salespeople do all the time with integrity.
Your challenge is that you have an offering that only starts to work for the user when you have lots of other users too, so I don’t see how you can deliver on the implied promise. You can’t sell me a ticket 100,001 to a party and when I walk through the door I find it’s only me. That’s an ethical problem, and it’s a practical one. It’s really, really hard to build a dating site one user at a time.
So I would look at two ways to go where the practical and the ethical can line up.
First, I don’t have any issue with the lean approach that says, don’t build the product until you craft the claim and gather data. So any number of sites out there are testing whether what they plan to make is going to be compelling. As long as it resolves quickly - join our beta wait list etc - then I’m good with that if it’s justified. (If a solopreneur does it, fine, but not necessarily Google or Facebook.) Your dating site could be a private beta, or you could manage the experience so that you build in (say) a concierge element so that the first 14 days a user is registered, the focus is on helping them build a private profile, with a private Facebook share so that their friends can like and comment.
Second, lots of value propositions can be delivered at smaller scale than the founders are aiming. Your better-than Groupon site can start with a fanfare in Des Moines, because you found two local stores willing to give it a try. And you can probably think of a way to make your dating site create a positive user experience when it has a few hundred registered users, if those early users have a strong common interest.
I’ve been surfing the web for about 18 years now, since back when people used to say “surfing the web” with a straight face. For over 17 of those years I’ve been sick of websites’ fake statistics and lies to the point that now I just ignore them.
How many times have you been drawn in by a fake offer from a website only to be disappointed? Probably not very often, because you grew wise very quickly that “CLICK HERE TO WIN €1,324,255” means absolutely nothing. How many times have you seen the “live membership ticker” that mysteriously increments exactly once per second?
IMHO, lies about the number of users you have is not only unethical but usually it’s pointless. You’d basically be no different from the millions of other websites doing the exact same thing and being ignored. Especially as the web gets older and search engines get better, it gets more and more difficult to fool people with that kind of trickery.
You want a successful website? Make it interesting, with regular updates, and of course good SEO.
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