Everything Is Legal If You Scale It Up

Together with FounderMarketer

Founder Marketer studies how brands command higher prices through strategic storytelling. Each week, we analyze how founders build businesses with the narratives, experiences, and cultural capital that justify premium positioning.

We examine seemingly different businesses that share one crucial insight: premium value isn't just created through better products, but through deeper stories

Subscribe here

"Every new breakout consumer app identifies a temporary weakness in existing platforms to gain an unfair advantage in distribution." ~ Nikita Bier

Think of it like this: these apps are the first to spot and exploit a loophole before others catch on.

Take Airbnb, for example. In its early days, Airbnb spammed Craigslist to drive traffic to itself and get bookings.

By leveraging Craigslist’s massive user base, Airbnb gained traction quickly.

Similarly, blackhat affiliate marketers buy brand terms on Google. If you search for “photo ai” on Google, a sneaky affiliate might pay to appear in your results, earning money even though they’re not the actual brand. There are ways to get over it but not many first time business owners know of those ways.

This tactic works because it exploits the system before it’s patched. Billie Eilish used Instagram’s 'Close Friends' feature to boost her album sales. It only got patched recently.

The founders behind these apps act more like blackhat hackers than traditional tech professionals. They don’t wait for permission; they find ways to bend the rules.

The team behind the Gas app, for instance, reinvented growth hacks from scratch over 4 months. The founder Nikita Bier had previously sold a similar app TBH to Facebook for $30m but he didn't use the same hacks as before. Each hack was unpublished, discovered independently, and only half still work today. This constant innovation is what sets breakout apps apart.

Scaling Legalizes Unethical Practices

When startups scale, their unethical practices often become normalized. Look at Uber and Airbnb. Both faced heavy regulatory pushback but grew so large that their operations became accepted, if not fully legal.

OpenAI provides another example. They scraped the entire web, including pirated books and copyrighted YouTube videos, to train GPT-3, ChatGPT-4o Image Generation model, and Sora. Meta is currently in court for scraping copyrighted books. These actions are questionable at a small scale but become industry standards when scaled up.

China’s approach with TikTok mirrors this strategy. By aggressively building a user base dependent on the platform, TikTok created a defense against regulatory crackdowns from the USA.

Similarly, the U.S. removing a $10 million bounty for Syria’s leader demonstrates how scaling up can legalize what was once considered illegal.

Smart Criminals Legalize Their Crimes

High-IQ criminals often go undetected, effectively legalizing their actions through scale.

Consider the companies selling cold outreach software on Social Media platforms. Many simply use leaked databases from the dark web. It’s illegal, but if they don’t leave traces, they rarely face any consequences.

Even well-known, regulated brands engage in blackhat tactics. Major casino brands, for instance, use blackhat media buying and SEO to compete. They solve for account restrictions, source accounts for scaling campaigns, and build networks of hundreds of sites to boost their SEO. These practices are widespread, often outsourced to specialized teams that take 7-10% of ad spend.

Forbes is a major brand that does Parasite SEO out in the open among many others.

Contextualizing Black Hat Tactics

Black hat strategies aren’t limited to hacking. They include media buying, SEO manipulation, and leveraging leaked data. Big brands use these methods to scale, treating them as necessary tools for competition.

When a hack seems too good to be true, large companies use it anyway. All of the biggest data companies have used unethical blackhat tactic to get their data. They just don’t talk about it anymore.

By understanding how scaling legalizes actions, we see that the line between ethical and unethical often depends on size and impact. What starts as a hack can become an industry standard, reshaping the rules of the game.

Travis Kalanick broke all the rules of the taxi mafia and even tracked the police, yet he made a billion-dollars only because he successfully managed to make Uber successful.

Everything is legal if you scale it up.

Thanks for reading, catch you on the next one.