Aren’t sponsored posts great? They give you an insight into how a startup will market itself and what they will do to get new users.
Startup, Cleanly, which will probably eventually go the way of Blue Apron and IPO and burn, is trying to find new customers for all the lazy kids that can’t either A) Do their own laundry, or B) Afraid to pick up the phone and call the laundromat across the street to come pickup their clothing.
But just two days ago we noticed this ad, where they said “Thanks to TechCrunch for this feature”, we clicked on it thinking we might find an actual feature, or an actual review. Nope!
Turns out it links you to an article, YC-Backed Cleanly Launches On-Demand Laundry Service In Brooklyn, that suspiciously was written two years ago and has 0 comments.
The best part about this is that the marketing team at Cleanly didn’t even test the link on TechCrunch’s website to see if it worked, before spending the money sponsoring the ad, woops! I’m sure most users will close this tab once they see this great warning message.
Apparently Cleanly used to have the domain http://getcleanly.com which they didn’t renew their SSL certificate onto, so any old marketing campaigns that point to the getcleanly domain instead of the cleanly domain, bring people up to a gigantic error/warning message.
Ouch.
