One of the most effective ways to getting customers, investors, etc is to steal prestige. I have not been particularly good at using this when I could have, but have seen others use it to incredible effect.
The idea is you co-op a trend or institution you are part of and use that to influence or make a deal with others who do not know any better.
Here’s a silly example first:
Conan O’Brien
While at Harvard, Conan O’Brien wanted to meet famous people he looked up to. One of these was comedian Bill Cosby (Obviously, this was before anyone knew how terrible a person he was). He used his Harvard email to pretend his was head of The Harvard Lampoon’s “Lifetime Achievement in Comedy”. According to him, Bill Cosby was the award winner that year. Bill flew all the way out to Cambridge and made a speech and Conan got to meet him. Conan could have easily pretended to be head of any club and any award with that Harvard email. There is no way for an outsider to check.
Lex Fridman
Lex Fridman, a podcaster/youtuber with millions of subscribers did a similar thing with MIT. Ivy league schools are really great sources of prestige to steal. He built up credibility as a PHD researcher/lecturer from MIT. The truth is he got his PHD at Drexel and was a one time lecturer at MIT which is still extremely impressive but not quite as prestigious. There is enough of a connection that people don’t completely feel deceived when they find out.
Sam Altman
Sam Altman is arguably the best person in the world at stealing prestige and that is not an insult towards him. It is extremely impressive. He publicly has noted his early exploits to go from a nobody to basically head of Silicon Valley. To get early investment in his fledgling company he got dozens of friends to pretend to work in his office when an investor came by to visit them. When he was made head of Y Combinator, he started up an AI Research firm (later to become the 100 billion dollar innovative OpenAI) by stealing the prestige of Y Combinator and making it sound like it was a branch of the program and not his own self funded project to recruit researchers.
Stealing prestige from a Trend
What if you didn’t go to an Ivy league school and don’t even have enough of a connection to pretend?
Barbara Corcoran
Barbara Corcoran, real estate mogul and Shark Tank investor publicly talks about how she got news articles and wealthy clients to come to her as a real estate agent. She would post what apartments celebrities were looking at and previously lived in. This would intrigue media outlets and others. There was just one catch, she made it all up. If these celebrities bothered to respond and correct her, they would have given her even more free publicity.
Stealing Bryan Johnson’s prestige
I know a startup founder who was struggling for several years and only had a few months of runway left before he went broke. He was trying to start a company around healthy eating and living for men and tried all manner of things. First he was throwing “T parties” which were testosterone testing parties which were strange enough to get some publicity but it wasn’t converting to sales.
Bryan Johnson is a multi, multimillion who is spending all his money to try and live forever. This startup founder saw him growing in popularity in the news and with a Hail Mary attempt at saving his company said his healthy meal plan was now the Bryan Johnson meal plan.
Do you want to eat like Bryan Johnson? Turns out a lot of people did. He instantly became profitable.
When it goes badly
An investor completely messed this up. He quite famously pretended to have graduated from Harvard to his cofounder and employees and investors to raise money. The truth was he graduated from the Harvard Extension School which is a completely different and very easy program to get into. His company pretty much imploded when everyone around him realized he had been lying to them for many years.
Depending on the situation, this could be seen as excellent growth hacking or terribly deceiving.