She paid people to cancel her competitor 🪓

How to get people to switch to you (with just a free month)

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She paid people to cancel her competitor 🪓

Lauren works at Cursor, the AI coding tool SpaceX just bought.

A few weeks ago, she posted this:

Free Cursor Ultra (their $200-a-month top plan) to anyone who cancels a competitor and sends her a screenshot.

This is a GENIUS way to offer a “free trial” 🧠

Every tool gives a boring free trial.

Lauren just added a condition → you only get it if you dump a competitor first.

The only way to claim it is a DM (direct message). So she now has a private chat open with every person who switched, and a built-in excuse to message them again when the free month ends.

People did it and posted the proof:

Every post like that is free marketing for Cursor. I love this so much.

A few days later, another Cursor employee, Tibor, ran the same play, this time with time scarcity (only 24 hours). It worked even better.

How to do it yourself 🧪

Have an employee post the offer from their own account, not the founder’s, not the company’s, as a person doing people a favor (and maybe getting in trouble for it). If it comes from the founder or the company → it’s just an ad.

Then:

• 🧾 Get a proof. Ask for a cancel screenshot, or better: their last invoice (so you know what they were paying).

• 🎁 Give free months of your most expensive plan. Don’t give cash.

• ⏳ Put a 24-hour deadline on it (round two had one at Cursor and it worked).

• 🧩 Get user feedback. Send the free month over DM and ask “what made you cancel them?” You’ll get golden insights.

Before the free month ends, you can offer to keep them at whatever they were paying the competitor

That’s it!

You can publish the cancel screenshots later (ask first). Tons of people canceling your competitor is 10x better than a “us vs them” page or a cringe comparison chart.

See you next week ✌️

Tom

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P.S. I wrote about $0 with a Twist last year (free stuff + one weird condition to get it). This is the same trick, but the condition is “dump my competitor”. Lol.