Okay, so it’s 3:00am and I am really not in the serious mindset so lets pick on something dumb and funny: Shipyourenemiesglitter.com. So this was a really funny social media thing back in 2015 (when I didn’t really use social media) and it’s constantly been recurring on Instagram and Twitter or whatnot for the constant new generations of social media users.

Now five years later, Shipyourenemiesglitter.com is still up and running and it seems to me they’re even profitting. I guess the occasional angsty teenager deciding to pay over $10.00 to have someone mail a pack of glitter for them is enough money to keep the site up and running. Yes, that’s right. It costs more than ten dollars to send the very basic glitter package to your enemy, friend, frenemies or whatever. I guess you could even send these to your boss but if you’re old enough and smart enough to work a job then you would have realized a long time ago that buying a pack of glitter costs $2.00 to $3.00 at Walmart and mailing them to someone at a post office like fifty cents.

Of course you’ll have to do the work of filling up your envelope with the glitter you bought, but that’s hardly any work and really doesn’t equate to around $7.00 which you could use to buy yourself a meal. Really the only marketable audience for this stupid business are dumb teens going through puberty or young people that are too ignorant and uneducated to understand how mailing an letter at the post office works which really shouldn’t be a problem because… well we have Google.

Additionally there are other services this website provides such as sending confetti, plastic penises, literal poop, and more for higher prices which really isn’t that better than the glitter themselves other than the actual poop because its pretty gross to be carrying your poop and putting it in a package and mailing it so it might be worth it to pay the $15.00 to send some cow manure to your worst enemy. Additionally, they offer a service of sending a “text bomb” for $2.00. Are you (excuse the language) ******** kidding me? You could literally do that with your phone or a phone app that hides your number.

But here’s the surprising thing. The reason this useless business made it on to Startup Central is this: the creator sold the website for $85,000 and claimed to have made six figures in sales. Matthew Carpenter, a self described entrepreneur and marketing professional pulled off an incredible media stunt that net him six times the yearly pay of a minimum wage worker within a few weeks of hardcore trolling.

Essentially what Carpenter did was this. As an SEO(Search Engine Optimization) professional and media analyst, he understood that the media loved and was desperate for weird ideas. On top of that he learned that media sourcing can be really lazy meaning news outlets were just outsourcing content from other sites and citing them instead of doing their own investigating. Using this idea he targeting platforms like Reddit and Product Hunt to blow up the website service and once that gained some traction he targeted news outlets by contacting them directly. Honestly, brilliant. This dude is a marketing genius.

 

https://shipyourenemiesglitter.com/item/Text-Bomb-64

Exclusive: How This Man Got the Media to Fall for ShipYourEnemiesGlitter Stunt