Startup Lessons from my Piracy Website

The most consistent reaction I got when I started writing about HeheStreams publicly was a version of the same observation: it’s weird that the illegal version of a service is better than the legal version. I’ll let the reviews speak for themselves; a quick search of HeheStreams on your favorite searchable social media website will yield similar sentiment.

That observation is the thing this page is actually about. The lessons below are real and I stand by them, but the more useful thing to notice is the structural reason a piracy site ends up beating venture-funded incumbents at customer experience. It’s not that I’m a uniquely talented founder. It’s that I had no fallback. No legal monopoly. No exclusive content deal. No brand equity. No press cycle. No way to acquire users through paid channels. If a subscriber had a bad day with HeheStreams, they could leave with one refund request (I honored all of them at any time) and zero friction, and I’d have no way to win them back because I couldn’t outspend their next option.

Legitimate streaming services can afford to be hostile to their customers because their customers can’t actually leave—the content they want is behind a specific service’s paywall and there’s nowhere else to go. I didn’t have that protection, which forced me to build the only durable substitute: trust.

That’s the actual lesson. Everything below is what trust looked like in practice.

Lessons from growing a piracy B2C

There was a longer list here, but it felt like this was turning into a listicle. In short:

Talk to customers like you would a friend of a friend
Your pricing should reflect what your ideal customer would pay, not just any customer
Recommend competitors when something isn’t working out with a customer
Be great at one thing and just do that one thing
Learn to say no, like to supporting MMA and college sports

So what every other startup should do.

Why this works at small scale and doesn’t at large scale

The single most important thing about the list above is that none of it scales the way investors and operators want it to scale. You can’t hire a hundred-person customer support team and ask each person to bring their own personality. You can’t write a playbook for “talk to users the way you’d talk to a friend of a friend.” Personality and consistency are in direct tension and the larger you get, the more the system optimizes for consistency.

The week after my mom died I was terse on customer support. I was short with people. I have specific memories of replies I sent that didn’t live up to my own standards. One user, who’d been on the platform for about a month, replied to one of those emails to tell me that since I was providing a service, I owed it to him to do better. He churned shortly after. He wasn’t wrong about the standard. He was wrong about the human being on the other side of it being able to meet it that week.

I bring that up because the model I’m describing—one person, owning the relationship, putting their actual voice into the channel—has a failure mode and the failure mode is a human being having a bad week. There is no way to engineer around that. You can either build a system where one person carries the relationship and the relationship is real but fragile, or you can build a system where many people carry the relationship and the relationship is robust but generic. Almost every legitimate company picks the second one, then spends millions trying to fake the first one. The fake is detectable. That’s why piracy sites win on customer experience: they’re not faking the first one, they are the first one.

The other thing this model needs is alignment between the operator’s incentives and the user’s. I was the operator and I was also a user—I built HeheStreams because I wanted to watch the Lakers and BallStreams pulled the rug on me. The product had to be good enough that I’d use it. Most B2C executives don’t use their own product the way their users do. The structural fix for that is hard. The accidental fix is to build something for yourself first and let other people in second.

Someone on the HN thread asked how I thought I had a good chance of getting away with it. The honest answer is that I wasn’t doing the calculation they thought I was doing. It wasn’t about the money. It was a thing I built for myself that other people happened to want, and once they wanted it I felt obligated to keep it running well for them, and the legal exposure was a consequence I knew was theoretically possible and didn’t really weigh against the daily work of making the product better. That’s not a defense. It’s a description of the actual decision-making process, which is closer to “drifting into something” than “calculating a risk.” Most operators of small things—legal and otherwise—will recognize it.

Most importantly: I never tried to get away with it.

Lessons still working

I’ve applied these principles to a Mexican ecotourism business I co-own and they hold up. Some of them will never scale to hundreds of thousands of customers—you can’t automate personality or hire for charm—and that’s fine. They work beautifully for small teams that have decided “small” is the point.

The takeaway

Wouldn’t trade the lessons. Would strongly advise against the exit strategy: “acquired” by Alliance for Creativity and the Motion Picture Association.