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.
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.
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
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.
> Most commonly for newly launched things it means someone with an @company email has tried the tool (even if they didn’t pay)
The current growth hacking play is to have people look through their personal network to find friends who work at those companies, then to have those friends say they’ll try the software
So it’s unlikely not even organic signups. It’s being pushed to friends and friends-of-friends who are unknowingly being used for their company affiliation.
It is organic signup, not coming from personal networks. (We launched on Reddit a few months ago and it went really well.)
There are individuals within the orgs who have used the app, giving us feedback through calls, or even paying for individual licenses.
I think this is way too far. For me personally, the threshold to put the logo is someone within the company is paying, even though the whole company is not in a contract. For example, you might not have a full fledged contract with Google, but one manager of a tiny team might have used her/his company credit card to pay for your tool. If the sum is below a certain threshold, they don't need to authorize or go through vendor vetting and all that.
The threshold should be that a relevant representative of the company agreed to have the logo displayed on the website. Anything other than that is deceptive.
Well "Joe in accounting from Google is using it" doesn't have the same glamour as putting the Google logo apparently.
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".
kudos for being transparent on your approach here
> 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.
There's a lot of heavy lifting in the idea that someone who tried it / used it of their own volition that happens to work for, say Google, is the same as indicating that your product is "used by Google".
It's a lie of accuracy, but still a lie.
The customer used a Gmail address!
I feel like everyone already understands that argument and it won't convince anyone that it's any less of a lie.
> If the users are from those companies, this is not lying.
Do you really believe all of those companies allow employees to install pre-release software on their computers which records company meetings and interacts with a long list of 3rd party APIs? I doubt it.
They could have had people who are employed by these companies use it on their personal computers for some purpose, but the implication they’re trying to make is that those companies have chosen this software. That’s a lie.
> and interacts with a long list of 3rd party APIs? I doubt it.
It does not interact with 3rd party API.(except opt-out-able analytics) It uses local-ai models. No data leave user's device. It helps users in large org to try it.
> but the implication they’re trying to make is that those companies have chosen this software.
We used "Our *Users* are Everywhere" to avoid that implication. It is not typical B2B software, but open-source desktop app that individuals can use.