How I Growth Hacked Instagram to Drive $13,000 of Card Game Sales

[gusord]

How I Growth Hacked Instagram to Drive $13,000 of Card Game Sales​

In 2017 I launched a College and University themed version of the game Cards Against Humanity. College Cards, as I dubbed it, was my first ever ‘official business’, and as a 22 year old recent college grad, I was pretty excited when I sold $13,000 of the game to University of Wisconsin students just 45 days after launch.

How did I do it?

Easy.

I growth-hacked the College Cards Instagram page with fake followers, fake engagement, and fake everything to make it look like the game was all the rage.

This way when I drove real traffic and real people to the Instagram account, it looked like College Cards was simply something you had to own.

It worked well. Honestly, too well.

The game went so viral that the intellectual property law firm representing the University demanded that I shut the whole thing down and threatened me with a trademark infringement lawsuit if I didn’t comply.

Checkout this article written by the school newspaper at the time.

Looking back, this was one of the best things to ever happen to me.

It’s the reason I wound up pursuing the entrepreneurial path and why I was able to start a new company which has become 10X more valuable than College Cards ever could have been.

But more on that later…

Allow me to explain exactly how I growth-hacked Instagram to drive hundreds of product sales and thousands of dollars of revenues in a short period of time

https://preview.redd.it/qteyqtfdwp5...bp&s=a4bf98432339f9a4718c0bee7612d2a234f3c77c

College Cards Instagram Follower Count = 0​

The goal was fairly straightforward. Prior to launch, I wanted to create an engaging and seemingly popular Instagram page for College Cards that would showcase the game. This way, once I started driving traffic and real people to the Instagram page, they would be much more inclined to check it out, interact with a post, and perhaps even buy the game.

I started out by buying 500 fake followers for the Instagram account. Perception is reality, and my plan was to make the account appear as if it was all the rage before the game was even launched.

To buy the followers, I simply typed “buy Instagram followers” on Google, and went with a company that was using Google Adwords to bid on that search term. It might have cost me $20 back then to purchase 500 followers.

I put in my credit card, added the CollegeCards Instagram handle, and voila! 500-ish followers followed the account by the next day.

College Cards Instagram Follower Count = 500​

Next, I needed a solid gallery of photos and content live on the Instagram page before I started driving traffic to it. This way once people landed on the account, they had content to peruse and tag/share with their friends.

I took pictures of the game content with my iPhone. I intentionally made the combinations that I posted on Instagram as outrageous as possible. I knew that the more raunchy and ridiculous I could make it, the more buzz and word of mouth the Instagram page would generate.

https://preview.redd.it/31t1h2amwp5...bp&s=29d84180a8529743d403e0bbdab12206a8556be4

Fake Engagement 101​

It wasn’t enough to just have fake followers. To make the account look like it was thriving and active, I also needed some of that Grade A fake engagement.

I needed people liking and commenting on the game photos to create the illusion that the game was popular, hilarious, and fun.

In the fake world of Instagram, manufacturing fony engagement isn’t hard to do. It’s just time consuming.

Every time I’d post a new photo, I’d head over to Kylie Jenner’s Instagram account, open one of her recent photos, and comment something like: ‘LB’, ‘Lbbbbb’, or ‘LB LB ’.

You see, Instagram is a huge cesspool of fakers. ‘Engagement’ is the currency of the cesspool, and as a result, it has become commoditized. You can purchase fake engagement just like you can followers. There is a whole micro-economy that lives to generate this type of engagement. And there are huge numbers of people working day and night to try to game the cesspool system.

People like me.

By simply commenting LB (“Like back”) on the recent posts of insanely popular instagram accounts like Kylie Jenner, other poor souls would take the time to click on my profile and like my photos in hopes that I would return the favor and “Like back” theirs in return.

Insane, right?

Below is Kylie Jenner’s most recent post on Instagram. Take a look at the comment section, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.

https://preview.redd.it/7lvoye5rwp5...bp&s=5bb069361ce5c3a2149284bbc4bec4a4ad8d8304

So, this was my system. Post a hilarious and outrageous photo, comment hundreds of times on Kylie Jenner’s Instagram account to generate phony ‘likes’, and then do it all over again. My College Cards Instagram content was generating hundreds of likes this way, and the page was coming alive.

Generating fake comments was harder. Especially for an Instagram account like College Cards.

I could have simply commented “Comment back” or “CB” on Kylie’s posts, but doing this would only get me a bunch of pre-written comments like “So inspirational

 

[sorrowsun]

@gusord Way to highlight the worst parts of influencer culture.

 

[gusord]

@sorrowsun The internet is fake! Everyone has a profit motive

 

[ksnyder0925]

@gusord I agree! I don't see any problem with this.

 

[robinsonlighting]

@gusord

I started out by buying 500 fake followers for the Instagram account.

.....

I spent hours and hours simply ‘following’ students on Instagram who went to UW Madison.

This is the best way to get your account shadowbanned. You 'succeeded' despite this. Not because of it.

 

[postio]

@robinsonlighting I've been learning how to gain followers organically, it's not that difficult. There are a lot of niche hashtags that get a lot of engagement that you can "own" like long tail SEO. Engagement begets engagement. Once you start reaching the top of a lot of hashtag discovery pages, you will naturally start getting a few followers a day. Those new followers further engage with your posts further boosting your visibility on those pages. Repeat.

There are also some machine learning based boosts. Photo composition, etc helps discovery ranking. Instagram knows what a good image looks like.

 

[gusord]

@robinsonlighting agree to disagree

 

[613jono]

@gusord Bros getting so much hate, all I see is a hustle. Not going to knock how he gets it.

 

[atlkate]

@613jono My guess is that the hate is from the style of hustle. But you're right, still took alot of effort.

 

[jemmy]

@atlkate See my above comment! Basically - Reddit is starting to hit mainstream and marketers know this. No rule enforcement = spammy reddit which becomes crap.

How is this a Sweaty Startup or tailored for this group? Its a copy paste job.

 

[atlkate]

@jemmy Hey I totally agree. I complain in many subreddits about this exact issue quite a bit if you check my post history. I think it will eventually kill reddit. Its too hard to fight overall. And you're right it's so easy to game this system and get semi-viral content to drive sales in almost anything. I see many content marketers posting bullshit in many subs at once just to drive traffic and it ruins subs overnight.

 

[jemmy]

@atlkate Reddit is usually (or used to be?) quite a savvy audience. I guess the mainstream is taking over and falling for all the bullshit.

 

[atlkate]

@jemmy It issue is just built into the design. The anonymity creates a false sense that most of the info is genuine when it's not. So its really easy to game. It's similar to Twitter in the bots that are unverified. But I enjoy Twitter more these days by following those who are verified, it just misses the ability for easy group discussion like Reddit.

The mainstream is already here in Reddit and has been for more than 5 years.

 

[gusord]

@atlkate Can confirm, it took 9 months of working 6:00pm -11:00Pm every night after work to get this thing off the ground

 

[613jono]

@gusord 90% of the internet is deception and lies. Not knocking on how you did, it's just a crappy fact.

 

[jemmy]

@613jono Hate is because its a blatent marketing post trying to get some free traffic without understanding or caring about the audience. As Reddit starts to become more well known in the mainstream, businesses are starting to spam it for marketing and free traffic.

Mods need to keep up on this! This isnt even a Sweaty Startup!

If we dont keep enforcing things like this, Reddit goes the way of Facebook and all these other crap, spammy sites.

 

[hisluv4me]

@613jono I thought it was fascinating. Aint no victims here either. I don’t know if I would apply it to my business but I still fill like I learned something.

 

[613jono]

@hisluv4me How I see it is I want to know every possible way people are hustling, then I can make better decisions.

 

[lilpeoplez]

@gusord You bought followers, engagement, and copied a game that already exists. You must need extra strength antiperspirant for all that sweat.

 

[uilanik]

@gusord I don't get the hate in the comments at all lmao.

OP saw an opportunity to capitalize on a niche market (if you could call it that), and used social media as the driver for sales.

They gamed it to start and then built a solid consumer base off it. It's marketing 101 - fake it till you make it.

No one (or at the very least, no millenial/Gen Z) is going trust an account with 30 followers with their money. You could argue a big chunk of advertising is like this to an extent. All the influencer shit you see is this kind of advertising - someone pays an influencer to talk about how a product is the best thing since sliced bread and how they use it all the time. Meanwhile they got paid $1k to spew some bs on a story.

OP made bank off their strategy and I think the only mistake was using trademarked IP, which messes up the scalability of something like this.

All I see here is someone seizing an opportunity outside of the typical service-based power washing, brick laying, etc. you see on this sub. No hate to those industries or entrepreneurs in any way at all, but OP understood their market and what they look for in terms of "social proof" and won.

Keep up the sweatiness, OP.

Edit: for those calling this a scam, it's plainly not a scam. This is a genuine product that adds value - entertainment for the user. You could loosely argue the way the following was generated in the first instance was scammy but there's no way you could call the product/business itself a scam.