Comment by itsalotoffun
4 days ago
I'm always amazed at these relatively tiny projects that "launch" with a "customers" list that reads like they've spent 10 years doing hard outbound enterprise sales: Google, Intel, Apple, Amazon, Deloitte, IBM, Ford, Meta, Uber, Tencent, etc.
This one is especially bad because I doubt all of those companies allow employees to install unapproved software that records meetings and uses so many 3rd party APIs
The social proof logo list is an old scheme on the growth hacking checklist. There was a time when it was supposed to mean the company had purchased the software. Now it just means they knew someone who worked at those companies who said they’d check it out.
At this point, when I visit a small product’s landing page and see the logo list the first thing I think of is that they’re small and desperate to convince me they’re not.
Wow, I had no idea that the bar was that low. That's ridiculous. I think I'll follow your approach from now on.
We’re firmly in a world where “cheat on everything” is an acceptable business, startups that were hacked together in a week at YC claim they have SOC2 and vibecoded GPT wrappers claim they “trained a model”. Shameless lying took over tech, and if anyone catches you lying, you double down, make a scene and a bunch of podcasts will talk about you. Free advertising!
Of course, dishonesty is as old as time, but these last couple of years have been hard to watch…
People learn fast from the Whitehouse
Yeah, IBM employee here, not speaking on behalf of the company, own opinions etc. The odds this is approved for employee use are essentially zero.
have to admit that we did some logo plays. but our users are really all over the place and just wanted to show it off! i am not sure how it looked but that's why we didn't use terms like "teams" or "customers" to be honest while showing some validation.
> we did some logo plays
Help me understand what this means
The most honest version is the company is paying for the tool. The most stretched version I’ve seen is a former employee of a company uses the tool in a personal capacity. Most commonly for newly launched things it means someone with an @company email has tried the tool (even if they didn’t pay). You could, for example, set up a waitlist and then let anyone with a logo-worthy email in.
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to show that we are acknowledged by many users from various orgs. we listed users who talked to, but we do not know if they still use it as some of them are not reachable(lost contact). i am admitting that we wanted to seem official so that's why we had all these logos where our users are "from".
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> i am not sure how it looked
Well, it looks a lot like you're playing word games to get clout-by-association that you don't necessarily deserve. That doesn't seem like something an authentic person (or people) would try to do. Are the other claims about your team and software equally unserious?
"Logo play" is such a YCombinator word for Lie.
It says "Our users are everywhere" and shows some logos for the companies these users are from.
If the users are from those companies, this is not lying.
If they added logos for companies their users are not from, it would be lying.
Adding a logo to your webpage has started to follow different patterns for the stage of the company.
Early stage companies show things like "people at X, Y, Z use our product!" (showing logos without permission), whilst later stage ones tend to show logos after asking for permission, and with more formal case studies.
They may not have asked for permission to show these logos, but that's not the same thing as lying.
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