Is it okay to find users from Craigslist to tell them about your startup too?
Another thing that I never understand is If I draft the email personally by hand then it is okay but if I use a template to mass fill the emails with [first name] then it is spamming? How does one decide the ethical side of such growth hacks?
I'd argue that the people we're pitching want to be pitched - it's actually a part of their job. We're just doing it at scale as a way to save a lot of time.
> Is it okay to find users from Craigslist to tell them about your startup too?
I know you're joking about this, but I'm pretty sure Airbnb would have failed without doing exactly that.
At the end of the day the ethical line is one you need to draw yourself. But IMO if the people you're emailing expect to and are OK with receiving email pitches from you you're well on the "ethical" side of the scenario.
Ask (almost) any reporter: They want to be pitched.
There are sites like www.helpareporter.com which do the exact same thing but the difference here is that the reporters opt-in to get the emails. I think that is a more ethical way of doing it.
>I know you're joking about this, but I'm pretty sure Airbnb would have failed without doing exactly that.
Wow, though as per AirBnB it was a rogue marketing agency which did it without telling them.
Link for the lazy (first article on Google): [1] http://www.tnooz.com/article/airbnb-admits-rogue-sales-team-...
HARO has like 5 requests/day, and it's for very niche topics. If you're writing for TechCrunch you expect to be pitched. That's just the way it works.
> as per AirBnB it was a rogue marketing agency which did it without telling them.
I call bullshit on that. They funded the company selling cereal for $50/box on Craigslist. They knew how to play the Craigslist game. Craigslist is incredibly difficult to mass post on, you don't do that by accident.
I don't blame them from shying away from it when they were big enough for people to care, but I bet you if you had them in private they'd admit to it.
Plausible Deniability as a Service
In addition, the email addresses that reporters give on websites are not their real addresses. The publicly shown addresses lead to spam buckets, precisely because too many people are sending emails indiscriminately.
Facebook prevents scraping user data via the API for exactly this reason.
I still think emailing reporters through their publicly provided email addresses is different.
If you want to debate whether ads in general are ethical, I'm really not about to have that discussion yet again; I'll let someone else take it and we can all argue the same points we always do for the millionth time.
If it's unsolicited, but not bulk, it's okay. If it's solicited (where solicited means "opt in, with a confirmation of that opt in") it's okay. As soon as it's bulk and unsolicited it's spam. And that doesn't change if you hand craft the emails or use a template.
> As soon as it's bulk and unsolicited it's spam
Did you mean to write this? You essentially said to stop saying "spam" and that this is spam...
Users -- especially those hitting the "spam" button -- define spam.
Whether or not something is considered spam depends largely on whose interest you're serving by sending it: the sender's, or the receipient's.
Amazing how well that old-school growth hack still works...