actual picture of a Hatchtrack chicken trying to do a startup (credit: me and my chickens)

I get it, gamification works. I’m not sure if this fits the formal definition of gamification, but it feels like the same thing. Get a person really interested in doing things, they keep coming back, everything goes great for you. If you gotta Farmville it up, make people like playing your game so much, then charging them to be able to play it MORE….

It’s how all these hidden addictions disguise themselves — as psychological games. Facebook notifications, email sounds, text notifications, something about a Snapchat…the semi-random distribution of the notifications, the generally pleasing effect of seeing someone +1 your post, desire to contact you, or associate that texting sound with (usually) happy feelings of the people we text a lot because we like texting…insert long rant about dopamine cycles here.

Shut the fuck up, Michael. Internet stuff isn’t that bad. Lots of people do tons of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, with no ill effects whatsoever.

God, I sound old.

But, this isn’t about how Facebook is going to melt your face off and society is going to implode because no one is dating anymore and everyone is just fucking around on Tinder…

Dammit, I’m still sounding old. Let’s end this rant.

It’s just about how fucking annoyed I am with Facebook. I had a startup launch that didn’t go great, I was too dependent on Facebook marketing, I made mistakes, etc.

I don’t blame Facebook, that really is my fault, for a variety of reasons.

But, looking back, I see why I HATED using Facebook for social media marketing.

Just look at it. I learned enough about “graphic design” during my wear-all-hats attempt at a product launch to lighten the parts of the picture that weren’t important, circle the parts I want to talk about in red, and leave the Hatchtrack logo too so that everyone can associate the Hatchtrack logo with a post about not liking Facebook and failure.

A huge portion of the business version of the Facebook page is…advertisement to me to spend money on Facebook, invitations to help me build my business, invite other friends from my real life to like my business, tell me what my response rate is. Let’s also make sure to push our other platform, Instagram. You can pay to advertise there too now, all from this one convenient interface. We don’t give a shit which platform you advertise on, we own both now. But that’s ok, because this is the way to advertise now. Best bang for the buck, right? Is this gamification of advertising? (Does that make Facebook a scam? I’m just asking questions — Glenn Beck (not really Glenn Beck))

putin, king of pavlovskayas

Listen, it’s good to know your response rate to messages. It’s data that should be collected. But for perfectionists, people who want to excel (you know, the kind of people that are trying to start businesses, and realize Facebook is a pretty easy way to do advertising, right?), it becomes addictive. You WANT to get the badge — that means you have lowest response time, so you even consider hiring someone to just do customer service or social media marketing because you have to do that these days, right? (The answer is no). I didn’t hire a social media manager, and our good response rate was definitely mostly due to my wife, who was my awesome partner through all this, and the depression that followed it too.

It tempts you with stories of how other posts are similar and people boosted those posts. Everyone’s doing it. You scroll down — you have the option to BOOST POSTS! Everyone’s doing it! What’s that? Well, you can pay, and then Facebook will show your posts to more people. That’s how advertising works, right? It’s also an impulse buy. You get to feel you can test that days marketing strategy, and get INSTANT results. How many people will like this? It really does turn people into commodities — a set of of thumbs up and hearts that you try and translate into sales. But really, Facebook doesn’t care, because you’re just sending them fat stacks of cash. And this video is really popular with women aged 35–44. Don’t you want more women age 35–44 to see this? They are a big percentage of the people who incubate eggs, right?

And lets ignore the fact you can also boost a post directly to your own followers. Why would you need to pay to show it to your own followers? good fucking question. Because it looks like only about 10% of people who have gone out of their way to follow my page (because they LOVE my social media marketing campaign) actually see my shit. So I can boost the post, so that other people who have already said “I like this” can see it. Facebook makes you pay to find your audience, then you get to pay again to advertise to that audience. Fucking brilliant.

Then, you accidentally turn on “worldwide” for your advertising campaign, and your advertising costs DROP for the number of follows you are getting. You buy the expensive champagne to celebrate (I didn’t do this), for you are a social marketing god who just gets how to do marketing. The followers roll in! Then you realize worldwide is bigger than you realized, and there’s no way you can sell to everywhere in the world, and you’re wasting your money again.

I might be the worlds worst marketer, but god damn can Facebook figure out clever ways to squeeze dollars out of you.

they’re so adorable. that guarantees more people will LIKE, which means buy the product

You post great pictures, you talk about the product, you make videos about it. People seem excited. And the right people. People who incubate chicken eggs. They are excited, happy, the reception to the price point is pretty good! People seem to understand what it is, how it helps, what the greater goal is — and also they love the pictures of chickens. If you all you need to do to advertise is post pictures of chickens, so be it. And if you give that picture a boost, more people will see it. More people seeing it will result in my people buying this smart egg incubation assistant, right? I’m basically doing the world and my future a favor by getting more eyes on this thing.

Not only do people give my chicken pictures a lot of hearts, they post GIFs of “Shut up and take my money!”. No way — it can’t be this easy, can it? If more people are coming in and getting more excited about it, I’d be stupid not to spend more money on Facebook advertising. So I did.

I was totally bootstrapped. Still am. The startup’s money is my money. The money that feeds my wife and kids. It’s not some nameless investor. The other targeted advertising options were expensive, and I have to make every dollar count. I’m spending the most dollars on engineering. On building the product. And since I’m designing the hardware, that cuts down cost a lot. And I know cool people, and helpful people, and brilliant people, who are helping me with this. But building something good is hard. So you spend money where you feel it is important, ditch the thousands of dollars other venues would charge — the chicken specific venues — and trust that Facebook is a great way to target people who have “chickens” and “incubation”, and probably “homesteading”, and maybe “urban homesteading”? It’d probably be a waste of money to hire someone with advertising experience anyway (and also, you don’t have money to pay another salary, and only some engineers seem interested in working for free).

there’s even a ROSE behind this one

You’re just some engineer who loves chickens who had a great idea to try and collect that data worldwide through a retail product…just because you wanted to get more information about your own incubation and your crazy chickens. Everyone sells a retail product — why not try and have it make the chicken community a better place too?

I didn’t hit my Indiegogo funding goal — and I dropped it by a factor of 10 at the last minute. But even an Indiegogo person contacted me and said they were a chicken guy, and wished me luck — so this must be a good idea, right? Maybe I explained everything wrong. Maybe my product is shit. Maybe I’m just the worst marketer in the world. Maybe Facebook should have a big fat scam label on it. It’s not a scam, is it? But I know a lot of people with a lot of businesses who have not been able to “make Facebook marketing work”. Maybe that means it’s bad — maybe it means we don’t know how to do it. The extra dangerous part is that the barrier to entry is — nothing, which makes it very easy to start any kind of business and start throwing cash around. Not only nothing — it’s convenient! You’ll never know if it’s worth it or not until you throw some money at it.

I’d love to start a business where people have no idea if my product will work, and am under no obligation to produce any real meaningful result. And then to have people just keep throwing more money at me.

Instead, like an idiot, I tried to do a hardware startup, startup style.

Hatchtrack isn’t dead. Even though I tried to act like a startup, maybe we just never were. I saved up money to build this, and am cranky enough to succeed. We have working prototypes. Building things is hard, but the proof is done. I’ll build it and sell it at a booth at a chicken show and advertise in the local farm store. If it’s something people want, it really will grow by itself, and I won’t have to give Facebook another dime.

I’ll just do what I did to grow my Facebook page. Post my pictures. Because I do love my chickens, and Facebook is the appropriate platform to post pictures of your kids.

CALL TO ACTION

That’s what social media marketing has right? A call to action. We can’t just read something to learn something. Like and share this. Or retweet. Or re-Instagram? Subscribe and thumbs up!

Or, as the sage Jeb Bush once said — “Please clap”.