Transcript
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Welcome to Scale Tales – the business storytelling podcast where entrepreneurs, executives and experts share firsthand accounts of those magical moments when they achieved something bigger than even they could have imagined.
I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and I’ve been out here in these social media streets for quite some time. Well, not really. The only platform where I have a real presence at the moment is LinkedIn and, to my credit, I was an early adopter back in 2005. I remember the first time I had a viral post on there. It happened in 2018, 13 years later! That was after 13 years of genuinely connecting with people and writing non-AI posts. It was a lot of hard work and the virality happened unexpectedly.
So I understand the appeal of paying for a service to help you potentially get to a viral moment quicker. But is it worth it? Does automating an otherwise long game pay off?
Well, we’re about to find out from our show’s first villain. Reformed villain to be exact.
This is Ep.31:How Tim O’Hearn Made Millions Automating Over 1.5 billion Instagram Engagements and Why He Regrets It
I’m Tim O’Hearn, software developer and author of Framed: A Villains Perspective on Social Media. I’m located in New York City and this is my scale tale
It started on July 1, 2017. As Instagram became more popular as a social media platform, so too did the desire for people to grow their clout, their following, and really their overall exposure on platforms like Instagram. In July of 2017, I was approached by a team of nightlife specialists in the New York City area who had created a business getting people more Instagram followers.
Today, that might be a story that we’re tired of hearing or something that’s been well trodden, but I believe that my experience with this business, my journey with getting people more social media followers using software, is a really unique story of scale and conflict between people like me, customers, and also the platforms that we were operating on. This social media business really began with understanding the
problem or what we were selling to customers.
And what was being sold was popularity, digital popularity, and what it might bring customers. Would Google search, how do I become more popular? How do I grow my follower? How do I do more conversions or something like that, but they would end up on sites like ours. When I say ours, what am I talking about?
The company that I was involved with, we have chosen not to name for legal reasons, but in my book I nicknamed it Shark Social. Shark Social was a company that offered organic Instagram growth. Customers would sign up and from there they would be able to choose a plan, and with that plan they would be, kind of shuttled towards this automation solution that increased their exposure on websites like Instagram.
How did this all work and where did scale come into play? I think we see scale in software startups in unique ways in that you are taking some aspects of human capital and you’re kind of taking it to the next level by using software, doing things that would either be extremely tedious for a human being to do or that just simply would not have the same exposure if not for a software platform. What I was able to do with Shark Social was create a program that would log into Instagram accounts of our customers and get them more followers. It did that by logging in and taking normal actions.
So if you think about a normal behavior or set of procedures on Instagram today, it was not unlike that. If you can think about scrolling, swiping, liking, tapping, commenting, sending DMs, the software that I created did most of that. And it did it in a way that it was very difficult to determine that it was not the person, the human being doing it. So when you receive a like or a comment or a DM on Instagram, maybe today, in 2025, there’s some indication that, you know, this might be spam, this might be a bot.
In 2017, 2018, 2019, and really through 2022, when we shut the business down, people were not as privy to the problem of bots or really the plague of bots. Our service was a bot. And in being a bot, it actually violated Instagram’s terms of service. It wasn’t illegal per se, but it did violate some of the central tenets of the terms of service, which is now baked into the Meta terms of service, which is that you’re not allowed to do anything by automated means and you’re also not to engage in behavior that is potentially disruptive.
Scaling any number of interactions is very unique in that it could quickly become disruptive. So the one example I like to give has to do with email spam. Through a lot of the early eighties and the early Internet, spam became a problem, specifically email spam. We got to a point where spam blockers became a prominent product. Something very well documented. And every household had a spam blocker.
People talked about it a lot because email spam was a major problem. Now we get into this realm where we are so overwhelmed by notifications, nobody really has a concept of what it means to block spam anymore. I could look at my email inboxtoday and, even with filtering, I’ve received hundreds of messages.
And of course, this was more than when I was a kid in 2005. But the issue is that even though we’ve kind of dressed up the spam or dressed up the marketing, it’s marketing just the same. So spam wasn’t just disruptive for the sake of being disruptive. It was disruption that was selling a product. And what we were doing on Instagram was much of the same. Most of our customers didn’t have products, but they were selling themselves.
They were hoping to build their own persona as an Influencer, as someone who is either worth paying for, maybe worth hiring, maybe worth inviting to a party. In some cases they were, very, very small scale accounts. They were doing the same as many marketers were doing they were just selling themselves.
They were hoping to build their brands on the platform. And rather than sitting there and tapping on their phone all day, they came to companies like Shark Social and said, let me offload this burden and this toil to a company that is essentially facilitated spam on the platform. Now, what did we run into? We ran into, usage limits and different restrictions on the platforms, because you could think, if I’m just using software, what’s the difference between sending 5,000 comments per hour versus 5 comments per hour?
It’s virtually nothing if a computer is doing it. But if a human is doing it, that’s a significant amount of work. And if any listener could think about how quickly they could leave 5,000 comments, or even if they’ve left 5,000 comments in their entire life, which might be unlikely, it’s of course a problem if a computer can facilitate this. At scale, Shark Social was just one player in a space where I’ve documented about 200 different companies that did the same thing.
And within this space, there was an understanding of the best way to grow accounts, considering the restrictions both of the platform. Andy’s just natural sanity limits of, like, what you could get the computer to do day over day, or what you could get the computer to do when you might be running thousands of customers accounts at the same Time.
At Shark Social, we ran thousands and thousands of customer accounts and facilitated hundreds of millions, or I should say 1.5 billion engagements on the platform, which was a really big deal. But behind the scenes, the algorithm, the central piece of code, the functionality that underpinned the business was the same across almost all of these 200 agencies. Maybe there were 30 prominent ones and many copycats.
And that algorithm or that procedure was known as follow/unfollow, which was, was abbreviated as F-F, which meant follow/unfollow. You can think about it this way. If you’re on Instagram, regardless of who you are and what your profile looks like, if you shoot out a hundred comments in a day, 100 follows in a day.
You will receive some comments and some follows in return. You’ll receive some likes in return. This is what we know as reciprocation. And in the real world, this is natural. We don’t talk about it. But if I walk down the street and I give somebody a compliment on their choice of clothing, their hat, their glasses, even if they don’t really want to compliment me or they didn’t feel too strongly, they probably will reciprocate, or at least at some level, they’ll reciprocate.
So what we did on the platform was we took that belief and we, made it an industrial operation. We made it so that each account was sending roughly 300 of these actions every day. And in turn, we were finding our customers were getting up to 20% of those actions reciprocated, which varied widely based on the quality of the account. But even in cases where the customer account quality was quite low, we were still seeing rates between 8 and 10%, meaning 100 follows that were dispatched. We’d get roughly 10 back.
And that was the magic behind the whole industry. It was why it became an immensely profitable industry. Very high profit margins, very high intent behind search. And millions of dollars were generated across businesses like ours and across the rest of the space. Of course, the largest players were those that were perhaps in a little too deep. There have been some lawsuits that kind of grew out of it. But one of the most interesting pieces of research that relates to this story of massive scale, is how did a platform like Meta actually find these, bot operators which were breaking the rules, offering a legitimate service, but breaking the rules?
How did Meta go after them?
Yes, how did Shark Social and other companies like them ultimately get caught? Well, it required some reverse engineering.
And the interesting part, is that they had to think like the villains. They couldn’t say, “Oh, this is disruptive.” They couldn’t take a guess. They actually had to go in as deep as possible to kind of find these patterns of behavior. And the biggest research study, or the one with the biggest impact, is called Following Their Footsteps. This was published by researchers at Meta, I think, in collaboration with researchers from UCSD, but it never received any news coverage.
What these researchers actually did was they went through the process of manually creating about 100 Instagram accounts, and they then used those accounts to sign up for services like Shark Social. So they created the accounts and they knew this was only for the purpose of research. They then signed up for the illicit service providers and they just let them run.
Think “decoy.” I actually found that research paper by UCSD which is an acronym for the University of California, San Diego. Here’s the abstract of that paper that Tim is talking about. Listen as Lee Peterson reads it…
“Online social networks routinely attract abuse from for-profit services that offer to artificially manipulate a user’s social standing. In this paper, we examine five such services in depth, each advertising the ability to inflate their customer’s standing on the Instagram social network. We identify the techniques used by these services to drive social actions, and how they are structured to evade straightforward detection. We characterize the dynamics of their customer base
over several months and show that they are able to attract a large clientele and generate over $1M in monthly revenue.
Finally, we construct controlled experiments to disrupt these services and analyze how different approaches to intervention (i.e., transparent interventions such as blocking abusive services vs. more opaque approaches such as deferred removal of artificial actions) can drive different reactions and thus provide distinct trade-offs for defenders.”
Again, think decoy. In order to catch companies like Shark Social, this team of university and Meta researchers had to bait them in.
And because they controlled the accounts, they were then able to check. And of course, they had some extra access because they actually worked at Meta. They were then able to analyze patterns of behavior that were common to each one of these providers of services. And they were able to see things like, oh, what are the IP addresses? Where on the Internet are these accounts being run? What are they doing? What Time of day are they running at? How do they work through this?
They were able to identify all of the accounts on any given platform. Shark Social, we weren’t a large player at all. We were maybe 20th or 25th. They identified probably the top five players and they found that they had hundreds of thousands of paying customers, where I claim a scale of perhaps a billion actions. These companies, the largest ones, might have been doing a billion actions per week.
To clarify, Tim estimates that Shark Social performed over a billion engagements over their five-year span compared to other companies that had that output in the span of a week.
And that’s where things get really, really difficult. I think there are some, you know, implications there that are deeply concerning. Things that I kind of covered in the book. Thinking about the scale and Following their Footsteps, the outgrowth was that, you know, Meta themselves had to think like the villain to kind of go in and react to them.
What they did and the guidelines they provided out of that was the pop up some people might have seen, which was, “We are taking action against illicit followers.” You actually would have received a pop-up in Instagram in the app that says,
“We are removing followers that it looks like you might have gained illicitly by using one of these follower growth services.”
So the difference between these services and what we know as like fake followers or bot farms is that you were still logged into your account. So it wasn’t obvious you didn’t grow by a thousand followers overnight. If we were only taking 300 actions per day and you’re getting 30 back, the growth was actually modest. It would have been, maybe a thousand followers per month, maybe 2,000 followers per month. Most people would be happy with that.
But it wasn’t entirely a matter of insane growth compared to just like, Hey, you click and now you have a thousand followers. That was what made it so interesting, but also made it something really rife for abuse.
So why was this such a scalable idea? Why were so many people interested in it? Why were so many customers happy even though the service was breaking the rules? It was because reliably actions were reciprocated at a rate of 10%. And that rate was able to be seen even in Meta’s study. And that’s something I highlight in my book. It was something that was so interesting to us because we had independently verified it just to find that the Meta researchers had basically landed on the same number.
It does beg the question, why were so many people interested in this service? Didthey really know that hiring Shark Social to boost their popularity on Instagram was breaking the rules? Whether they knew it or not, it likely didn’t matter because what customers were paying for was results. They didn’t care how the sauce was made, they just wanted the sauce!
Yeah, that’s right. In most cases they’re looking for the direct result, which is followers and also likes, but mainly followers. And in most cases, we were able to demonstrate huge success for clients. Clients would come back to us and say, Wow, this really changed the game.” Especially those in that critical range.
They might have a couple hundred and they’re looking to go to a couple thousand. We might not think a couple thousand followers is special today, but for people who are just getting their start in this industry, that industry being social media influencing in 2018 especially and into 2019, it was a really big deal.
I would argue it’s still important. And there’s much debate over what is often referred to as vanity metrics – metrics such as number of followers or subscribers or connections. It’s like a double-edged sword. On one end, the number of people who follow, subscribe, or are connected to you can be seen as superficial. But on the other end, there are people like book publishers, event planners, and even potential customers who see high numbers as a sign of popularity, and, well, also as a sign of your value whether perceived or real.
Yeah, absolutely. Regardless of what you’re doing on social media, whether it’s your first day or whether you’ve been doing this for 10 or more years, there’s no escaping these vanity metrics or what we would say are just like the prominent metrics on sites like Instagram. What Instagram really hasn’t been credited for is making, making this aspect of it so in your face.
Whenever you look at someone’s profile, you can always see followers following and posts. On other websites such as MySpace, if anyone remembers that, it actually wasn’t prominent at all. You would have to click on someone’s profile and then scroll way down past their music player, past their about section to see how many friends they actually had. So it wasn’t until much later in the process that the social media sites realized, Oh, this is important.
And Facebook skipped over there too, because Facebook originally was anti-friend request everybody. It was anti-build-a-following. It was for college kids. So it was much more private in that respect. Instagram kind of brought us back to this situation where your value as a human being or your success as a business often comes down to your follower account. And I can think of so many scenarios from my own life where the first reaction in a social circle or on an individual basis is entirely based on the social proof.
So not the merit of what I’m seeing, whether that’s a picture, a video on YouTube, a product that I find on a website, it’s is there any social proof? So, for example, if you look at a YouTube video and it’s 60% thumbs up, 40% thumbs down, you’re going to be much more likely to leave a thumbs down because you’ve been influenced on the social proof that has come before you. And people saying, hey, this is not high quality.
Likewise, if you find an influencer on Instagram and they have a million followers, there’s really no, as cynical as you could be, there’s really no getting away from that. That is a prominent person in their field or that is a prominent brand. So while myself, I discount it severely because I’ve seen all the sneaky ways that companies are still cheating the follower metrics. There’s no getting away from it being a decent summary because otherwise. How would you summarize someone’s content? How would you really know what they’re doing?
We’ve always had these metrics and before this, what I identified as badging. on Instagram, there’s a few things you could have next to your name. you could have the blue check mark. But when you think about it, before this all became, oh, blue checkmark or just a follower account, you had these very clunky badges which would appear on web forums, and you had something like the power seller badge on eBay.
How did you know that an eBay seller was trustworthy in 2003? Well, if they had a power seller badge, it meant that they were doing good enough volume and presumably had a high enough rating. So we’ve always looked for these shortcuts. We’ve always looked for what I call this digital insignia to indicate success. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s like a dictator in a country awarding themselves with war medals. Eventually the medals become meaningless. Eventually these badges, the blue check mark and the follower counts themselves are devoid of meaning.
Digital insignia. Now that’s an interesting term. Aside from that, as you listen to Tim you might be wondering, why did these automated engagement bots upset companies like Meta? Did it boil down to the potential money they were losing on ads? This is where Tim’s scale tale will resume…after the break.
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Tim O’Hearn is a self-proclaimed reformed social media villain. He once wrote code for software bots that successfully increased people’s number of followers through a series of carefully automated posts, likes, comments, and even DMs or direct messages. Now, he’s sharing how people like him did this and the implications it had in his latest book. It’s called, “Framed: A Villain’s Perspective on Social Media.”
Before the break, we learned that Meta, the parent company of Instagram, worked with university researchers to discover how these bots worked. Obviously, they were not happy about these disruptive, automated engagements on their platform. But, were they upset because of the increased inorganic activity on the platform or did it really boil down to them being upset about the loss of potential ad revenue?
In case you’re unaware, most social media platforms offer payment options to either boost or advertise a product or service their users want to promote. You see, it’s a platform’s means of offering a way for customers to raise their profiles and garner more attention while also filling the platform’s coffers.
Here’s Tim.
Yeah, that’s a really important point. And I think the observation is it really underpins a lot of that central conflict of the book, which is to say we were an operator essentially offering this black-market advertising service that occurred on the platform naturally. We were in opposition to the platform itself and the platform’s own advertising suite. The original, not research, but the original journalism that kind of popped up in 2017 and 2018, highlighted this and said, well, You can sign up for Instagrass.
It’s $10 a month and you can get thousands of followers per month. If you run platform native ads on Instagram, to get a thousand followers, you might have to pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for ads because as you and I both know, ads simply do not guarantee followers. I’ve run ads on almost every platform. There is no platform that will allow you to pay per follower.
You can pay per click, you can pay per impression, but you can’t pay directly for sale and you can’t pay for follower. And that’s why I think there’s a natural conflict there. it’s an area very rife for automation and practices that ultimately became very disruptive. You can look at your feed now on Instagram or anywhere else.
I mean, LinkedIn is a crazy one because they’ve really jumped the shark there. But you don’t feel that your feed is overly disruptive. It’s not disruptive because even as you’re getting, sprayed with ads, it’s still managed in a sane way. The problem was that back in the day before the bot controls were really there, too many people using bots, it would completely overwhelm your feed and it would create a very disruptive user experience.
So it wasn’t just that they were competing with the advertising dollars and the advertising for clicks and impressions. It was that services like mine did make the platform a worse place to be.
And if a platform becomes a worse place to be, then that means a negative customer experience which could ultimately lead to people leaving. And when people leave, they will likely go to a competitor. So, to avoid having to shut down their services, Meta instead created a regulatory environment to shut down or disarm companies like Shark Social.
Yeah, we went through some ebbs and flows at Shark Social. It was, I don’t want to say feast or famine, but if you look at the Stripe payment diagram, you can see periods where it was, we’re never going to have to work another day in our lives. We can hire more, we can maybe even decrease our prices to get more customers. And you can see periods where things were lighter, there were less customers, there was a higher rate of churn as well. And a lot of this was correlated with actions that were taken by Instagram, coming out of Following their Footsteps.
The next year, 2019 was really the death knell for Follow Unfollow. So this classic algorithm where we log into your account, you’re going to take 300 actions a day, you’re going to get 30 followers back or thereabouts, and you’re going to be happy.
Nobody was happy with that anymore because it did not work. That activity limit of maybe 300 per day was down to 100. And it did feel like Instagram/Meta was able to pinpoint all vectors of exploitation and they were able to even block the logins.
So for a lot of the tests that we ran and a lot of our customers, it got to the point where we really couldn’t even log into their accounts and run our scripts for a day or for a week. Even though the results for some accounts were still decent, the amount of investment we would have had to make to continue reverse engineering what enforcement actions were being taken and why it would have been outrageously expensive for us to continue.
So, anonymity aside, who was Shark Social?
The easiest way to identify which company it was is because we were operating so late into the game and years after some of the largest firms had actually shut down, we had still continued to innovate. I had continued to build out ways to kind of subvert the detection systems, but by 2022 we just folded.
We just thought, you know what, we all have other interests in our lives and this is a losing game. And of course, at a certain point if there was legal action, we would never have operated in opposition to that. So we figured it was better to quit while we were still somewhat ahead and ensure that our remaining customers were still kind of happy with it.
Tim, at Shark Social’s peak, how many customers do you think you all had or do
you remember?
It was in the thousands. Concurrently, probably about 12 to 1300. So that was generating, I would say roughly $40,000 a month at a profit margin that was approaching 90%. When we actually calculated the profit margin, that was the big number for us realizing we’re bringing this in, we’re paying the Stripe fees, we’re paying for some of our operators.
And our technology costs were nontrivial, but in the grand scheme of things, it was a software as a service business. And that made for like an extremely rich business model. We look at it and we think if we were making this much, how much were some of our competitors making? The funny thing about code naming this company as an apex predator is it gives the image that we were actually number one.
We were number one in that we’re the only one who wrote about it. I’m the only one who came out and said, I’ve taken the precautions, enough time has passed. I captured so much of the technical aspect in my own drafts and diaries and that kind of became a book. All of the other players have simply vanished.
And trying to interview them for the book I mean, I knew about eight people and most of them actually earned more money, which is crazy. None of them wanted anything to have to do with the book. And these people were spread all across the world. Some of these people, they liked the book and they happily accepted copies of it. But when asked for quotes, asked for editorial reviews, asked to provide some expert advice, nobody had any interest because everyone realizes that there’s a pretty big risk here.
And I think the biggest risk is, underscored by a lawsuit that was filed by Meta against, I think, Social Envy Limited or Social Series Limited, a company based in New Zealand. They essentially were getting legal notices like cease and desist letters. And it’s a case study in what happens when you don’t abide by a cease and desist letter. So they would get the letter, they would shut down, they would reskin and open up under a new company.
And then Meta would uncover that a couple weeks later. After it happened a few times, they were sued. But during the discovery process, it was unearthed how much money this company had earned. They had about three main employees, which was similar to Shark Social. We had three partners. Somebody did sales, somebody did operations. I did technology. Social Series Limited had earned almost $10 million.
Wow!
Getting people more likes and followers. The case was settled and essentially the founders basically just got lifetime bans from all Meta products, which in the grand scheme of things, I think is a pretty fair outcome. But the thing is, if I didn’t write this book, I don’t think anybody would remember how crazy things were, especially in that 2018, 2019 thing. To answer your question, what ultimately led us to close in 2022 was partially this legal threat.
Although this case was settled, when I tried researching it on my own and even using AI, I could not find information about it. Instead, what I did find was an overwhelming amount of lawsuits filed against Meta from individuals, states across the U.S., even different countries for things like privacy violations, discriminatory ad targeting, and addictive algorithms.
And in case you’re wondering, when Tim mentions 1.5 billion engagements that Shark Social created over five years here’s what he means. In that five years, combined, their bots liked, followed, unfollowed, commented, and sometimes sent direct messages to various accounts. Those are considered engagements. And, yeah, he estimates they did 1.5 billion of them.
Now here’s another interesting fact. In preparing for this interview, I noticed that Tim doesn’t have an Instagram profile.
There is a reason behind not being on Instagram and a lot of that reason is related to how many accounts under my control have been banned or restricted over the years. So while most of our customer accounts were scot free and they were fine and unaffected by anything we did, we were operating in violation of the terms of service.
So to kind of prod for and figure out what the limits were and how enforcement worked, I had what were called burner accounts.
This is just like the hundred accounts that meta created themselves when they were doing their research. I had to create my own accounts or buy them to do my research. And because of this, as time went on, I would say that, maybe I was in the crosshairs a little bit more. And it led to this situation where I was worried about getting a lifetime ban from the platform, even though I don’t really use it. Now it would be convenient
to return to Instagram and say, Hey, I am a villain from the Instagram past and I would like to now promote my book.
For me, it’s not totally congruent with what the book actually contains. It would be so ironic to go there and then to lose the account for reasons out of my control. Because a lot of the book deals with the immense control of these platforms exerted over their user bases. The greatest irony would be to actually put in time to manually do things myself on Instagram, just to find that I get banned for either breaking the
rules in the past or promoting a book that has something to do with breaking the rules, but does not condone breaking the rules.
It’s good to hear that Tim does not condone breaking the rules, but I wondered if he considers himself not a villain, but as a superhero. That would definitely make sense considering our representation of guests on this show as superheroes.
As far as where I stand in the spectrum of villainy, I’m definitely reformed at this point, or there’s definitely been some penance here. Ultimately, when I looked at it, I thought in the grand scheme of things, I was not the largest player. I was not actually the shark. And that was something I didn’t realize until pretty far into the game. Because the point is, when you’re getting new customers every day, you don’t always
have time to, you know, look around and say, Oh, well, if I’m getting 20 customers today, is he getting 200?
Nobody thought about it like that because we thought we had a really good position in the space. So when I look at this and think would these larger players have something against this book or would they be inconvenienced by it? Are they powerful enough to actually affect my life? This was a concern for a while. And originally this book was written under a pen name.
What ended up getting published was under my real name because so much time had elapsed and it’s been so long since any of this activity was largely viable that the one or two players that still exist in the space, they could try, but the point is that they’re on very shaky ground. So to say, “Oh, I’m either going to do something underhanded to get back at this person,” or, “I’m going to take legal action against this person.” I don’t think either really matters.
I think if I came out in 2018, when I first made contact with journalists and said, “Hey, I’m involved in this space. I can take you really deep.” I think that I could have accelerated the timeline of Instagram’s enforcement actions probably by almost a full year personally, with what I knew by some point in 2018, I probably could have moved this, June 2019 catastrophic event that saw a lot of players exit the space – we could have done that in summer 2018.
I would say perhaps the greatest irony of all is that after having written the book independently, I returned to some of those journalists and said, hey, I’m sorry I didn’t collaborate with you back then, but I did write a book. Are you interested?
Basically, every single one of those journalists has said,
“Nah, if it’s not about TikTok, I don’t care.”
I think that’s the greatest irony in that these are tier one journalists essentially saying that when faced with a free copy of a book that was the story seven years ago. Six years ago.
I really think I could interview Tim for another two hours straight, but unfortunately, we have to wrap things up. But before we end, I did ask Tim if he had other resources he could share with us as well as tell us more about his book.
I think anybody interested in this unique angle on social media would be doing themselves a favor if they checked out Framed: A Villain’s Perspective on Social Media. For me it’s not been a money-making endeavor whatsoever. I spent two years writing this book independently free of outside bias and really free of a central message. It’s maybe a message of cynicism, but it’s also one of hope of what the Internet could be and some of the things we could reach understanding on to help move forward the social aspects of the Internet. For this reason, I’m listing my book for 99 cents.
Anybody who wants an eBook could download it on Amazon. The paperback is basically done at the thinnest margin possible. $15 gets you a 436-page book filled with citations, with about 30 chapters of all original research that’s on Amazon. Anybody interested in hearing more from me, you can find me on Beehive. I’m Tim O’Hearn and also my personal website, tjohearn.com.
Well Tim, again I have found your story to be your story as a reformed villain tobe absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your scale tale with us.
Thank you, Alicia.
Today, we often hear the words, “Fortune” and “Fame.” Their origin comes from the two Roman goddesses, Fortuna and Fama, both of whom represented the pros and cons of money and popularity. In our quest for fame and fortune, it might be tempting to engage in illegal behavior to acquire it, but ill-gotten gains don’t come without consequences. This is a big lesson to learn because as a founder, leader or project manager you will often be faced with decisions that can compromise your morals and ethics especially in high stakes situations. Here’s some other lessons to consider from Tim’s story:
- Know the rules of the game whether it be social media, the boundaries
of a project, or business in general, and play accordingly.
- Conduct business or manage your project with integrity
- Create and offer products and services that are legal. If they do venture
into a gray area make sure you include disclaimers so that customers
know what they’re getting into.
- Avoid get rich quick schemes.
- Use automation software as an assistant, not to completely replace
human activity.
- Remember, the product you create with certain intentions can morph
into something else. Will you force that original intention or will you
evolve to meet customer demand? Facebook was originally intended
for university students.
- If you create a product or service, expect that people will always find
loopholes and ways to bypass certain functionality. This is why audits
can be your best friend. It allows for checks and balances.
- The results of a short cut is no substitute for the result of a long game. I
can promise you that!
A special thank you again to Tim O’Hearn. There’s a link to Tim’s book as well as other books similar to this topic in this episode’s show notes. We even have a link to that research paper that led to the downfall of IG engagement bots. Visit ScaleTalesPodcast.com to quickly access this information.ScaleTalesPodcast.com.
If you’re a PMP interested in earning a PDU for listening to this episode, then once you’re on the website, click the button that says, “Get CEUs/PDUs Credits,” sign up for a monthly membership and we’ll make sure we submit your earned credit to PMI.
Thank you for listening! If you learned something valuable from this episode, please leave us a five-star rating and review wherever you’re listening.
I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and I produced and narrated this episode. Additional male voiceover was by Lee Peterson. And that female computer voice you heard earlier…yeah, that was me. Audio editing by Olanrewaju Adeyemo. Music production and original score by Sabor! Music Enterprises. Video editing by Gladiola Films. Show notes by Hashim Tale.
You’ve been listening to Scale Tales, a podcast by Equilibria, Inc.
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