One of the main premises of the book was to validate your side hustle with fake Google ads to see how many people clicked on your product. This was a very trendy idea at the time.
I knew several people who tried this trick, and it backfired for most of them. In the real world, customers are very averse to potential scams on the internet. They quickly notice if a company is pretending to be something it’s not, and they remember that the company was misleading for a long, long time.
The modern equivalent is a landing page that captures the user’s email to wait for an invite to the “current private beta”. Making a webpage that pretends to crash on checkout as this blog author suggests, is a terrible way to retain user interest and build confidence in your brand.