After several years of founding and running a VC backed startup that got acquired by a fortune 100 I am looking to reconnect with the founder community!
With AI it's such a fun time to build now, but go-to-market is the new bottleneck. I'd love to connect with folks to share stories!
So here's what happened. We were running campaigns, watching our click metrics climb, feeling pretty good about performance. Then we started digging into where those clicks actually came from.
Half of them were bots.
Not simple ones either. Headless browsers mimicking human behavior perfectly. Selenium scripts automating clicks at scale. Click farms using mobile devices. Advanced stuff rotating IPs, spoofing geolocation, faking mouse movements, generating realistic referrer patterns. Fingerprinting evasion. Timing tricks. Some were so good they looked completely human.
We realized most link tools just count clicks. They don't ask if those clicks are real.
