“Okay,” I say, “so we could even take it one step further. We build a money cannon. It’s a big cannon that shoots dollar bills. You just need a big fan, in a box, and then a tube sticking out. We mount the cannon on the back of a Hummer, with HubSpot in huge letters on both sides, and we drive around a city blowing money into the streets. Think of the disruption! People rushing into the streets, trying to grab as many dollar bills as they can. They’d be fighting over the money, like people at Walmart on Black Friday. It would be a nightmare!”
Dan Lyons Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble.
I shouldn’t be a total prick but today the Money Cannon became real. Someone finally offered me money to take a phone call. It was an big stiff enveloped marked “DO NOT BEND” from a “predictive customer acquisition” company. I opened it up and pulled out a single sheet of glossy goodness with an Amazon gift card stuck on it with that weird booger clue credit card companies use to stick new cards onto paper.
The instructions told me to go online, enter a PIN number and answer a short survey to activate the card. Nowhere on the mailer did it indicate what value the card may hold, so naturally I lied on the dozen or so questions (Afghanistan, Aerospace, “I don’t know”) just to get the online equivalent of a scratch ticket.
$5 — five bucks. That was it. And the best part was the come-on at the end that challenged me to take a 30 minute phone call to bump the card up to $50. Now we’re talking.
I bet their predictive algorithm didn’t predict I’d give them grief for loading up the money cannon.