[0 → 70,000] followers in 4 months, from scratch
oh HACK no! is a scam-education project for people who worry about their parents & grandparents. We started it because the advice out there is either a government page nobody reads or a local news segment built to frighten you, and neither one is something you'd actually send your mum.
02 / 5
Where it started
We started with nothing. No list, no following, no reason for anyone to trust two people they'd never heard of talking about scams. What we did have was the same frustration every time we went looking for something to send a parent: the FTC page is correct and unreadable, AARP writes to the parent instead of to us, the security companies write for a stranger's IT department, and the local news exists to raise your heart rate. All of it stops at "be careful." None of it shows you the message, points at the line that gives it away, and explains why that line works. So the gap wasn't information, there's plenty of that. The gap was something a 31-year-old would put her name on and text to her mother.
03 / 5
The approach, in three moves
Nail the format
Most scam videos start with someone warning you about something; ours start with the actual message on screen, and the first line points at the one detail that gives it away.
Publish relentlessly
Three to five posts a week
[Double down on what worked]
Posting five times a week gives you one useful thing: a big enough sample to see a pattern. Ours showed up fast. We called it the scam explainer. Same shape every time: the message on screen, the thing it gets right, the line that breaks it. Those videos have now passed 15 million views. So we cut the formats that were flat and pointed almost everything at the one that worked.
Swipe sideways for the next move →
04 / 5
The part most case studies leave out.
The biggest miss wasn't a video, it was the order we did things in. We built the course first. Months of scripting, recording and editing something we were sure people needed, before we had an audience to ask. It was good. It also sat there. Nobody was looking for a course, because nobody knew who we were yet, and a stranger asking your parents for a hundred dollars is its own kind of cold pitch. It took us far too long to admit that, mostly because we'd already paid for it in evenings.
What I'd do differently: Audience first, product second. That's the whole lesson and it cost us months to learn. If I started again I'd publish for six months before building anything, and I'd let the questions people actually ask decide what gets made. Not what I assumed they needed..
05 / 5 · NEXT CASE STUDY
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