Comment by brandnewlow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brandnewlow | Hacker News Reader

Hey, HNers,

Here's something I would pay money for and maybe other publishers, as well.

Through WindyCitizen.com, I get about 40-50 press releases a day trying to get one our writers to cover some event or celebrity appearance in Chicago.

This is absurd considering our site is all user-generated content. But we're on lists somewhere and so the PR industrial complex thinks we want to hear about all their fake news. It's really annoying.

I would pay money for a gmail plugin that lets me specify the e-mail addresses of X PR people, and then responds to their press releases automatically with an e-mail from me telling them what it will cost them to buy advertising on our site that promotes the event they're touting.

If they're going to spam me, I would like to be able to spam them.

Most of them will just ignore the e-mails, but they'll get the picture eventually.

Meanwhile, some of them will convert into advertisers. If I pick up $1500/month worth of advertising from this tool, I would gladly pay $30-40/month maybe more for a service that lets me do it.

It could be free for one e-mail address, $29/month for up to 50, and so on and so on.

This way, the indie bloggers out there who can't sell an ad to save their lives but who get bombarded with PR pitches in their inbox all day can automate their sales process a bit AND get the satisfaction of annoying the crap out of the PR people bugging them.

You can already do this with the Canned Responses Gmail labs plugin. Just set up a canned response and then set up a filter.

Just investigated! It's very limited. You can really only do one-line responses. I want to respond with an e-mail with pricing info, a media kit attached etc etc.

Still looking.

So what you want is, in essence, a service which you can set up a filter to direct messages to (possibly safer than letting it interact with your account directly?), which then responds to each email it receives with a message that you previously generated, possibly including attachments.

Gmail's vacation responder does all of that except attachments, but you could use the rich formatting of signatures to include links to your media kits.

Sounds like I can't just have it respond to specific e-mail addresses though. I'm telling ya. There's a fun service in there.

You can set up an email account specifically for the responses, and have messages forwarded to it by a filter. That's extremely hacky, though, and yeah, there's certainly a service there.

You can do that in the filter. Copy/paste your list of email addresses into the "From" field in the filter config, then tell it to send the canned response. You can't attach things with them, but if you upload them you can just hotlink straight to it.

Slightly more elegant than having it forward to a new email account and have that autorespond to things.

Canned Responses will let you write arbitrarily long responses. It won't let you do attachments. (But are those really necessary for a spam response? Just send a link.)

You'd pay $30-$40 per month for a service that generates an extra $1,500 in revenue per month? I don't think your argument for someone to build this tool for you is very compelling ;-)

Oh how I long for the good 'ol days when people just paid for value...

Well, I'd still have to close the sale, get the ad creative, have a web site that gets enough traffic to deserve an ad spend of that kind, run the ad, answer questions from the advertiser as the ad runs, take down how the ad performs, answer questions from the advertiser about their numbers....

So yeah, the thingie that makes it easier for me to do step zero in this process is worth about $40/month in that value chain.

A good rule of thumb for pricing software is that the software should generate at least 10 times its cost in increased profits.

Is the power of this the Gmail integration, or is the power in the list maintenance?

Thinking about the MVP, it would be trivial to write a program that would login to a user's specific POP3/IMAP account, scan for messages from specific senders, and auto-respond. But how would you maintain the list of PR flunkies?

Gmail integration would be great because I use Gmail and wouldn't have to use some other app.

So if this were a rails app, there'd be two models. You'd have Message Templates and Senders.

Message Templates would be subject line, body, signature, and any file attachments.

A sender would consist of an e-mail address, a selected message template, and then some sending settings (how long to wait before writing back, for example). There'd be a button for a sender to be "active" or inactive. If a sender is "active" and has a message template associated with it, then when an e-mail comes in, the sender sends back the template tied to it.

Then maybe each sender would have some stats about how its performing, how many times it executed, what the open rate on those e-mails was, if there was a response etc etc.

I'm thinking of this more as a value add for corporate email, actually. I suppose there are already CRM systems out there that do similar features, but it would be interesting to do it in a more open manner. Via POP3 or something, rather than a proprietary vertical stack (which is what I mostly see at my target companies).

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