Looking for co-founders/devs, $200/mo (you pay)

Nah, obviously I’m not doing that 🤣

However, someone had audacity to post exactly this on Developers of Ukraine forum (in Russian) on Friday:

Looking for PHP/Full-stack junior developers for a developer/co-founder role in a startup. Participation is paid (by you to me), 200 USD/month. Position is part-time, 15 hours a week.

This is presented as a unique opportunity to get experience in a world-changing startup (a goal tracker app) and become a more desirable hire in the future, and even get 1% equity in a venture that will possibly be worth billions — all for a modest $2,400 fee and a year of your labor.

There’s no MVP, no USP, no funding obviously, and the person doesn’t look like a troll. He defends this model in the comments with all seriousness.

I’m really bit sad that I didn’t come up with this myself. Not the idea of exploiting interns, but to post something controversial like that and get lots of hype like he got (10k+ pageviews, 230+ comments). After all, hype is traffic, and I need traffic for my app.

Despite being late to the party, here’s what I did. I created a similar post in a satiric fashion and heavily plugged my app there. This is called situational marketing, I believe. So far I’ve got 140+ visits to my landing page, and god knows how many installs, because Google Play stats lag behind a lot. I think I’ll write a short article about this venture in a few weeks when I’ll have more data accumulated.

The point here is, when you see something getting attention out of thin air, consider jumping on a hype train for some free marketing.