WePay Vs PayPal: GTM Campaign Highlight In 2010, a pre-revenue payments startup humiliated PayPal at its own developer conference and built a marketing case study still taught today. WePay, founded by Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman, had one real complaint to work with: PayPal's reputation for freezing user accounts. WePay dumped a 600-pound block of ice filled with dollar bills on the pavement outside at PayPal's own developer conference in San Francisco in October 2010. The sign read: PayPal freezes your accounts. Unfreeze your money. Use WePay. Total production cost was reportedly under 500 dollars. The stunt ran for one morning. It was picked up by TechCrunch, Mashable, Wired, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Conference attendees walked past it to get in, journalists filmed it, and the story became the spine of WePay's brand narrative for the next decade. WePay was acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2017 for a reported 220 million dollars. The lesson is not that stunts work. The lesson is that the sharpest positioning is usually a truth your competitor cannot deny in public. WePay did not invent the complaint, they gave it shape, physical weight, and a shareable image, in front of the exact audience who already felt it. Cheap, on-message, and unmissable beats expensive, safe, and forgettable almost every time.