Ask HN: Confession - I use fake staff names to make my company look larger

[alexc]

I hope making this confession will make me feel better. Apologies for the length.

I started a startup in 2007 and convinced a very close friend to join me. We raised about $25,000 from F&F, left New York and moved to Silicon Valley because "that's what you do", right?

We rented a $900/mth flat in San Jose and settled in. The plan was to attend meetups, promote our product, meet VCs and hopefully raise more funding.

Our first VC pitch fell flat because we had no traction. I went back to the drawing board and fell into the killer feature trap. Feature and feature went into the product, month after month went past, and we burned our meagre cash.

We ran out of money. My co-founder went back to his day job but I decided I had to keep working. If anything, to pay my mum back her $10000.

I've finally got the product right, new business model and a few clients, including a subsidiary of AOL.

Here is the problem. Nobody knows that I run the company by myself. Just me, using multiple emails and aliases, doing customer service, marketing, tech support, software development etc.

I'm tired of doing so. I need more people but the company can't afford people yet. My friends are all in day jobs, trying to pay their bills so I can't ask them to contribute more than a couple of hours a week or the normal "can you give me a 2nd opinion of this design" question.

I read yesterday that Omar Hamoui (AdMob's CEO) was a one-man company when he got funded by Sequoia. I wish I could be open about being a one man company but I'm worried I may put people off.

Any advice?

[mpf62]

Stop using fake names immediately and start responding with your own name in all cases. Many customers will probably think: “there seems to have taken place a reorganization; cool, now I have a single contact person for all my concerns”. They probably won’t even bother to ask where the other guys are. And if they ask and you really don’t know another way out, end this odyssey with a last single lie: you had to lay them off.

It is far worse if your customers find out by themselves that you lied to them. And I would say this is rather a question of when than if. Some of them will notice that all your employees have the same writing style and/or make the same spelling errors. I’ve once uncovered a “fake” company this way. The quality of their/his service was still as good as in the beginning, but I just couldn’t trust them/him anymore …

Of course, you may lose some projects for beeing “to small”, but it’s even worse beeing known as a liar.

[alexc]

You are right. It is a breath of fresh air for me. I'm going to take this advice.

It is just feels awful to lose business that you can execute perfectly well for a reason such as "being too small".

[mpf62]

Of course it hurts to lose any business just because some of your potential customers think your company is too small.

Serve the customers you can get now well. Not only does “many a mickle makes a muckle” (a Scottish saying that reflects pretty well a saying we have in Swiss-German) but also the concentration of risk is much lower.

And don’t forget: most companies/customers are (too) small by themselves and many of them prefer suppliers that make them feel more like VIPs than like numbers (we don’t care about you - you’re too small for us).

It’s not only a disadvantage to be small. And after you have proven that you have come to stay, bigger companies will notice it one day.

[makecheck]

I don't recommend starting out on a deceptive foot. This will probably be discovered eventually, and may lead people to wonder what else you've been deceiving them about.

It's okay to have virtual E-mail addresses like "[e-mail]", etc. for each category. But don't make them actual staff names.

When you say you can't afford people, do you mean full time, or at all (e.g. contractors)? Maybe you can find someone willing to work on something you need, which would give you a break. Then again, contractors can be expensive, so this would be a short term thing.

[alexc]

Thanks for the advice. How do you suggest I get out of this jam?

[spokey]

At minimum, since you're in a hole, stop digging. If you've got fake names on your website, I second makecheck's advice to use "support@", "sales@", etc. instead. Transitioning out of fake names with customers you have an established relationship with may be a little more difficult.