‘I turned $1.24 into $1000 of UberEATS credit’

A MELBOURNE man has “hacked” his way to more than $1000 worth of free delivery food by spending just $1.24. Here’s how he did it.

Josh Berg set up the site as an “experiment”.

A MELBOURNE man who “hacked” his way to more than $1000 worth of free credit on UberEATS by spending just $1.24 says he’s “never eaten so much delivery food” in his life.

Josh Berg, 24, who runs a digital marketing firm called Hedgehog Agency, admits the experiment was partly to score free food and partly as a publicity stunt.

But it worked. Mr Berg’s blog post, ‘I turned $1.24 into $1000 of UberEATS credit’, has not only scored him daily food and coffee for free, but it’s already started to generate interest in his business.

So how did he do it? In a nutshell, UberEATS gives users a unique referral code they can share with friends. If your friend signs up with your code, you both get $10 credit.

Mr Berg’s plan was simple: get as many people as possible to use his referral code by creating a website and buying advertising space on Google, so whenever someone searched for “uber eats coupon” or “uber eats code”, they would find his code.

“I love delivery food,” he wrote. “When UberEATS launched in my hometown of Melbourne, Australia they were offering free delivery. It was fantastic. But, one day the inevitable happened and the utopia of frictionless food delivery had vanished — Uber introduced delivery fees of $5.

“So, I wanted to see if I could get myself free delivery again. But this time I wasn’t going to take it for granted, I was going to earn it. That’s why I created www.iloveubereats.com — my ticket to free delivery for life (kind of).

“The idea is simple. I created a URL where I shared my unique referral code. I then claimed some free advertising credit and ran some ads to my site directed at those looking to use Uber EATS for the first time (the only way my referral code works).”

Mr Berg, who studied psychology before interning in marketing at Google, details the steps he took: using web service Honey to find a discount on domain registration, from $13 to $1.24 — the only cash he spent — registering with Google AdWords for $75 worth of free coupons, then buying his keywords.

“So, how effective was it? Well, super effective,” he wrote. “It cost me about 66 cents of free advertising money to acquire each ‘customer’ or $10 voucher.

“However, I didn’t actually pay that money as it was free ad credit. All I paid was $1.24 for my domain. That means I had a 80,545 per cent return on investment. If we pretend that I actually paid for the ads, I would’ve still had a healthy 1415 per cent return on investment. Even if these ads were paid I’d still be killing it. Speaking of which, I’ll be periodically turning the ads back on every time I need a bit more dough for delivery.

“My site was viewed 373 times. I had over 4000 impressions of my ads with a click through rate of 9.29 per cent. The whole thing took me less time to do than to write this article. That is about three hours of work.

“I’ve just been stuffing my face with as many sandwiches and burgers as possible.”

Mr Berg, who also set up a similar site for Deliveroo, told news.com.au the trick was “a little experiment” to test the power of referral codes and Google AdWords, “essentially hacking my way around a few of these services”.

“I’m seriously a massive UberEATS fan,” he said. “It was really just an experiment to see how far it would go.”

Mr Berg, who has six clients, said the blog post had already “generated some outreach” from brands wanting help with their digital marketing.

But he said Uber hadn’t been in touch. “I’m more than happy for them to get in touch with me,” he said. “If they want to take down my credit they can, but they can also see I’ve invited 100 clients [to the service]. I’d love for Uber to reach out and be a client.”

An Uber spokesman said: “It’s great to see someone so passionate about getting the food they love, delivered to their door with UberEATS.”

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