people are really crazy

About a month and a half ago I launched Findasaas as a completely free SaaS directory. I manually featured the first users, offered them free ad space, and tried to be as generous as possible with early adopters.

Those first users never complained. Some of the email threads were genuinely friendly, the kind of back and forth that makes you think you are building something people actually appreciate.

Later I introduced paid packages (the base listing is still free) and added a referral based package: bring 15 referrals who list their SaaS and you unlock a package with email marketing tools and other perks.

What did one user do? Instead of referring real founders, he went to Microworkers, created a campaign, and tried to brute force his way to the referral goal by paying people a few cents. The funny part is that the “referrals” were so low effort that most of them did not even create listings. They just clicked on his listing, liked it, and bounced.

Now I am honestly not sure who is more dumbest here: the guy who thought this would somehow pass as legit growth, or the workers doing 10 cent tasks that obviously create zero value for anyone.

For now, I have not flagged the account yet, but I am seriously considering public badges like “untrustworthy,” “slop,” or something equally stupid that makes it obvious they tried to game the system. I also implemented very aggressive rate limiting for traffic from the countries where all this fake activity came from, and I emailed both the listing owner and the “manager” who submitted it through one of those ai slop “we will list your startup in 100+ directories for you” services to let them know what happened.

If you are building any kind of marketplace or directory, learn from this: the second you introduce a referral mechanic, someone will try to break it in the dumbest way possible.