The numbers looked good. Really good. Strong ROI, solid attribution, something meaningful to bring back to our campus partner beyond just impressions and clicks. Lance and I had been looking for this kind of proof point. Then I looked a little closer.
Early in the business, Lance and I were reselling mobile geo-fenced ads to universities. The pitch was simple: deliver small banner ads inside an app network, targeting areas where high school students would be: within a half mile of a high school, near competitor campuses, that kind of thing. The goal was to build awareness and get in front of prospective students where they already spent time.
The platform we used had a feature we were genuinely excited about. You could set a collection geo-fence on campus, so if someone who had seen an ad also showed up and opened an app while they were there, you could track it as attributed foot traffic. We were helping a university promote an on-campus open house, and after the event we opened the dashboard to see how many students who had seen the ad had actually shown up.
Something was off
I was going through the report when I stopped and looked over at Lance. “Lance, every single number in this report is even. Not some of them. Not most of them. Every one. Does that seem normal to you?”
It didn’t seem normal to either of us. We called the platform.
The explanation
The rep was casual about it. “Oh yeah, for every device we observe, we assume there were three others that just didn’t open their phone while they were in the geo-fence. So we multiply every number by four.”
Not disclosed anywhere. Not a footnote. Not a methodology note. Just quietly baked into every number in the report.
What we decided in that moment
We looked at each other and said we were never selling this again.
It wasn’t a hard call. But it was an important one, because it cemented something for both of us early. If you want to build something real, you have to be ruthless about whether what you’re building actually adds value. You have to be honest with yourself and your customers about whether or not your product or service does what you say it does. Smoke and mirrors might get you through a meeting. It doesn’t build a company that will last.
Fake it till you make it is bad advice
I get why people say it. Early on, you don’t have everything figured out. You’re selling a vision as much as a product. But there’s a difference between being persuasive about where you’re going and being dishonest about where you are. You can be candid about your limitations and still make a compelling case for why someone should bet on you. In fact, I think that’s a stronger pitch. Customers aren’t as easily fooled as we sometimes assume, and the ones worth keeping are the ones who trust you.
The platform we were using wasn’t trying to build something lasting. They were dressing up a weak product with inflated numbers and hoping nobody looked too closely. We looked closely.
That lesson has come back up more times than I can count. The temptation to dress up a metric, soften a finding, or let a client believe something a little rosier than reality is always there. We decided early that it wasn’t worth it. I’m glad we made that call when the stakes were still small.