Innovative ways you've seen a company/startup pump up their metrics?

An Indian social app (not koo or sharechat) hired a guy who would go on different groups in the app and write “jai shri ram”. He will get about 40 replies saying the same. They said startup claimed high engagement and retention with this tactic

Created whole new metrics a.k.a Community Adjusted EBITDA lol

Hmm lol Worked at a influencer focused eComm enablement play (not very well known) We started charging the influencers a commission for their transactions (to finally make revenue) Then, we would pass back benefits to them as marketing expenses. So the revenues kept rising, but so did our marketing expenses, had no idea who this would’ve helped. I guess this is common in e commerce but still, was surprised to see it first hand

1/ The retention numbers depends on the start point you take, if someone is amateur in understanding of retention and the way it is measured than this number can easily be gamed. I’ve seen too many folks do it. 2/ heard some social app used to stream porn at night to improve engagement numbers.

“Ecommerce firm Meesho on Monday said it had turned profitable for the first time on a consolidated profit after tax (PAT) level in July”

Ex-NSE Ceo claimed that a himalayan yogi made her commit fraud 😂

B2B startup that somebody I know runs Existing offline transactions become part of the GMV/revenue Then they are paid off as rebates below gross margin And all costs of lending (as lending is core in B2B) are put down below EBITDA, despite it being a primary business item Sad sad stuff

At my earlier company (consumer Fintech), they used to include refunds, transaction reversals and cashbacs given too as gmv for investor metrics. Although a small proportion but just seems so weird to add these. When I asked why, they said it shows that the platform can handle these things also. Shittiest logic 😂

An idea for a FinTech to increase activation numbers (not sure if it's ever been done) Add $0.01 into unactivated accounts and activation rate goes 🚀

I worked at a company pre series A that faked revenue contracts just to reach $1M ARR to get to series A.

A startup my friend worked at used to send a few Google Analytics events n number of times from the client side. The number n was configurable using Firebase remote config.

Chori Hai Innovation Nahin