About 6 years ago, when I was working in Berlin, I was actively looking for pushers both online and offline. Being in Berlin and trying to find Spanish people who were active at Spanish universities, it was not easy to do from the web, but… we had an idea… to post our search on second-hand websites, on Loquo…

This allowed us to achieve a double objective: on the one hand, CVs from interested people that we would review carefully; and then—very importantly—traffic and users registered on our network.

Nowadays I would consider it a common practice, but with an unpleasant edge—mainly because it was about gaining volume of users rather than quality or solid relationships within the network we were building.

Today, rather than being so push, the action would be more pull: I would try to achieve it almost completely silently—identifying them on networks, monitoring them, and finally getting in touch with them. For offline pushers, I would do a direct sweep in the field of activity.