Great find. I noticed the photos disappeared yesterday, but didn't catch that footer reference change.

Sadly, Ryan Hudson knows how to play the game and Pie (with its charming .org domain) is on a roll --- already hit 1M downloads just 9 months after its launch and grown to 10+ Engineers/20+ employees.

Shameless.

On the bright side, LegalEagle also called out Pie in the video. Hopefully that'll help shine a light on them.

Agreed. As a recruiter, it's a useful signal:

If the company hasn't updated it within 2 weeks of the new year, I add it to my priority target list.

If the company hasn't updated their banner by April, I start thinking they're out of business.

Ryan Hudson, the founder of Honey, launched a new company that's already under scrutiny for similar practices:

Pie.org (despite being for-profit).

Founded in March 2024, it already hit 1M downloads and has 20+ employees/10+ Engineers.

Do we know if Honey has been sketchy from the start or if it started after they were acquired by PayPal in 2020?

Yeah, it had a sketchy reputation before the acquisition - here's a 2019 HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589352

Looks nice, but I'm lost. What do the colors represent? What do the axes #s represent?

The colours represent the categories in the filters. Sadly they don’t show which category is which colour.

Gift link to read for free:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/technology/dan-price-grav...

What a bogus piece. He's not a Professor --- he's an entry-level Lecturer (started career there a year ago).

I began my career doing this (Deloitte Tax's Private Client Group).

Yes, it is truly fascinating.

Nice! Another method is to go straight to the company's job post - searching words like "posted", "published", and "created" in the source code.

Exactly - talk about a marketing backfire.

How'd you determine this? I've always been curious.

well this one is quite easy, he doesn't even have a domain (using framer). I'm sure Asana or Hotjar aren't his customers.

Also in the post "Lifetime offers: We are currently running $100 one off offers for the first 100 users"

And in the website: "300+ customers! We are amazing!"

Ah, interesting - thanks for explaining!