Ask HN: What's your stance on this method for poaching potential customers | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your stance on this method for poaching potential customers

7 pointssdesol14 comments

To make the long story short, my future competitor's issues are online. That is, their bugs, feature request, etc. are viewable by all. And because of this, I can easily see what their customers/evaluators are saying about their product. These customers/evaluators also make their e-mail address freely available.

The question that I pose to you is, how would you feel if somebody contacted you about a problem that you had raised? Note before contacting the user, I would obviously have to believe that my product would be able to address the issues that they raised.

Would this be crossing the line or is this just how business is done?

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Legal, fair and ethical. You're offering a potentially better product to exactly the people that need it.

However, before you hawk your brand and wares, try to imagine yourself a good Samaritan and introduce yourself. You might get more information about their needs and wants than you can ever glean from a bug report. This stuff is called Solution Selling and it's a more conversational approach to sales:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_selling

N.B: the references in that page contain wacky commercial products. A better sales advice might be "just be human and be honest". Commercial SS includes variable pricing stuff you don't need.

Whatever you do, don't reference specific issues the customer had or statements they made. Most people will find this very creepy and stay away from your service. That said, you can tailor your pitch to whatever pain points that customer has.

So "I saw that you have a problem with X at wonka corp" is a no-no, but "My service is way better at X than wonka corp" should be fine. In general, keep it general.

How about "My service is way better at X than wonka corp, - also, we value our customers privacy highly and wouldn't dream of publishing your email address in a publicly available support forum."?

Well, for instance, if oracle contacted me 'cause i was on RedHat boards, I'd find it pretty creepy and irritating, especially if they started going off about redhat not respecting my privacy; I put my email on there myself. for someone else to go and assume that I didn't actually mean to put up my email would be kinda insulting.

But then, i'm not the sort of person who responds to sales solicitations. (In fact, I do my very best to avoid buying products that require negotiating with a salesperson- it's usually the mark of a higher price.) so you might not want to listen to me.

However, if you are poaching from a semi-open-source support form, you might want to keep what I say in mind.

Well allow me to be the lone dissenting opinion. (Edit: what follows should be interpreted as a rant against this practice, not against you personally, or your business idea :)

Harvesting user's emails from a 3rd-party site that you plan to compete against is unequivocally and unambiguously a shitty, low, underhanded practice. Not to put too fine a point on it.

You didn't put in the footwork or the dollars necessary to get those customers yourself.

You didn't get the customer's permission to contact them (and NO, just because a customer posts his email address in plainview does NOT mean he's implicitly given you his permission.)

You didn't achieve a real and meaningful relationship with your customers or your competitors.

You just harvested some emails that were left in plainview, no different than any other 2nd-rate spammer on the net.

Ethics aside, any business that depends on the glomming of email addresses/discussions from 3rd-party competitors is...the best word I can find is "uninspired". If you don't have a problem with this business model, you don't have a problem with targeted spam.

I think it's fair game. However, instead of building a feature and then pitching it directly to the user, I would create a landing page for it.

Something clearly laid out e.g. "(big text) Having Problems with X? -> describe the pain-point feature -> describe the app -> pricing / call to action"

This is better for a few reasons, I think:

1) It's less in-your-face. You don't want to be a sales douchebag and make the customer feel obligated to use your app because you've solved a competitor's pain-point. So instead of direct emailing them the pitch, you say "hey our app solves this problem - here's a page explaining why."

2) It's scalable, since you can just send other people to the same page without having to pitch them all the time. You could even set up some adwords campaigns for the specific phrase "XYZ app with ABC feature" and see what happens. You never know - people might be googling for a solution.

3) It's less creepy as it implies that the feature was built for the benefit of everyone (which it was) rather than the few customers that you've stalked :)

If the information is freely available then I don't see that as ethically wrong. It is like being in a bar and overhearing someone who has an issue with your competitor and approaching them.

Not an ethical problem. But I wonder if the customers might feel a bit spied upon. I would keep the communication generic, wouldn't mention how you got their address and not refer to just the problem that they mentioned.

Actually I would have thought the customer (after getting over being spied on) would have felt angry at Wonka corp for making it so easy for other parties to track them. That could be something you could capitalise on without being obvious :D.

Many people don't think like that; if your house gets broken into, you don't generally complain to the locksmith who fitted cheap locks.

I would want to know how you got my info like...

'Hi there, I was checking out Wonka Corps website for what issues their customers were having so we could address them in our product and say your issue and thought...' etc etc.

I say try it and see what happens. See what works, what doesn't, customize each contact and improve based on results.

I contribute bug reports to open source projects. If somebody contacted me through contact information leaked in a place like that about a 'competing product', I would be angry and probably blog about it. Fortunately, nobody reads my blog. Unfortunately, it is indexed by Google.

I believe you're 100% in the clear ethically.

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