Cold emails and Twitter (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Cold emails and Twitter (2018)

guzey.com

60 pointsherbertl23 comments

I'm currently working on a software solution that will wipe out the need for human labor in a certain industry.

I wonder if I should just build it, put it online with a "Buy" button and a statement "Here you can get the same as from the competition, but 10x cheaper". Then I would have to do marketing for it.

Or should I reach out to some of the companies who already have the customers and currently fill the demand via human labor? And see if they want to outsource their work to me for 1/10 of the price? Even if they don't want to do business with me, I could probably learn a lot from them about the industry.

But somehow, I'm a bit afraid the companies will hate me and the conversations will become unpleasant. I have nightmares of them sending a contract killer after me, lol!

Note, I haven't actually poked around to see what your idea is, I'm going off of solely this comment, but...in my experience, the thing you're worrying about is the last thing you need to worry about.

Here's the thing that I find happens more. I 100% believe that your solution could be as good as you think it is, but you're STILL going to have a hell of a time convincing people of it, and weird, seemingly goofy barriers, are going to come up. "Self-evidently" good software/solutions mostly don't exist, even when they are that good.

Based on your other post, you're in an industry that values relationships and trust. Sounds like the first strategy is a nonstarter. You'll need relationships to break in, which makes the latter your only choice, and probably means you continue to be a value added commodity. You won't own the relationship, at least, not without a LOT of work to learn the industry and its people.

Total speculation, but do you have a strong understanding of what needs to happen when something goes wrong with the process you are automating? It's sometimes too easy to automate 99%, and think you've got it solved, when the last 1% is the actual hard part.

Have you already validated it with real customers? Most likely there are still problems that need to be ironed out.

That will indeed be interesting.

The industry is very cliquey.

I talked to two people from the industry and showed them what the software can already do. They agreed that it is as good as what humans do. But both also said they would not become customers. Because they like to mingle with people and support them. One of them said that is also the reason they don't try to outsource the work to lower wage countries.

But I only need 0.01% of the industry as customers to have a great lifestyle business. So I will plow ahead and see what happens.

Plus, with a 10x decrease in costs, the industry might actually grow. There might be new customers coming in that previously were not interested due to price.

Think robotaxis: Not only would a robotaxi service get existing customers of old school taxis and Uber. They could offer a lower price and have people take a robotaxi who would otherwise have walked or stayed at home.

Can you not provide your service directly to the consumer?

No, it's a B2B thing. Consumers don't pay for it.

Think robopilot software. It needs to be put into a plane before consumers can use it.

Can you then not provide it as a service to businesses, just slightly below the usual market price? Selling the fish instead of teaching then your new way of fishing.

That is the plan. The "BUY" button would not be for buying the software, but for buying the service that they usually hire people for.

It is not possible to "hide" the fact that it is done by software. As there are some differences. The software is stronger in some aspects of the tasks and weaker in other aspects. Overall, the software is superior. But it is noticeably different to work with the software than with a human.

Think Robotaxis: Superhuman reaction time. Never sleepy. But bad at interpreting unusual situations. Overall, they will be 10x safer than human drivers at some point. But you will still notice if a human or a bot drives the car.

In the realm of NLP, there are some companies that offer a human in the loop service. So to the outside, they offer human quality results. And on the inside, they use their machine learning technology, supervised by humans. One way to do it, I guess, is to especially watch the results where the model is least confident. And of course, you feed back all of these corrections back into the model, so it becomes better over time.

And those objections you refer to, I am quite sure that people like journalists would’ve had the same objections to machine learning transcription services just a few years back. Now, of course, they all use otter.ai and the like and cannot imagine ever going back to slow human transcriptionists.

Yes, good example.

> I'm currently working on a software solution that will wipe out the need for human labor in a certain industry.

lmao, when has this ever been true.

I don’t see a lot of telephone switchboard operators, do you?

"Warm" emails are less scary: meet someone you want to work with, talk about their problem, and promise to follow up on that thing. Then do so, and do so knowing the quality of your follow-up email is a reflection on the quality of you a a potential collaborator. Find a way to offer a bit of value, while also showing the quality of your writing, especially your brevity.

Especially in the research space, I really recommend Twitter. In Software Engineering many really interesting researchers and practitioners tend to share their experiences there. In my experience it's a great way to virtually meet others who you would probably otherwise never encounter.

Heard of "Scrum"? Follow Jeff Sutherland (https://twitter.com/jeffsutherland). Like Conway's Law? Follow Melvin Conway (https://twitter.com/conways_law).

For me the novelty wears out the moment you start seeing these people's family pictures or political commentary. Even if I agree with them, I don't care about it, it's not why I follow them, it's just noise for me.

I'm not saying they should not post such content, don't get me wrong. It's just that Twitter becomes a distraction, your list requires constant maintenance, and the noise to signal ratio is not worth it for me.

I've tried Twitter a few times and I always leave this exact reason. I wish there was some more filtering or tagging options... so I could subscribe to @someone#research or @other#hobbies, and avoid all the noise. Some people have dedicated accounts, but it seemed to be a minority, I wish it was more common.

This is an issue with social media IMO. Not everyone uses every platform, so people without Twitter post politics/memes to Instagram (which I find really jarring) and those without Instagram post personal photos to Twitter when followers might be expecting just opinion/knowledge. Presumably platform owners have decided that channels per account are off putting for most users.

This. Having sub-channels in social media is long overdue. It will be a killer feature. If I want to post baby photos I can freely spam the "family" subchannel who will be more than happy to consume it. Similarly we can cater to a different set of followers with tech posts

I just unfollow anyone who does that. There are quite a lot of people who just stay “on topic”, more than enough to fill a feed. So while I might miss some interesting content from people I otherwise unfollow, it turns out a lot of the time someone else retweets it anyway.

Unfollowing itself when you see something off topic takes very little time.

I do agree with the other reply that being able to subscribe to topics from people would be awesome, but in the meantime it’s pretty good if you maintain a zero tolerance policy for off topic stuff.

Twitter is used small and quite homogenous pct of population. So you might not get a good advice on the Twitter.

Email is great.

My personal experience is that I did not get a good feedback this way. But the feedback from paying customers is gold: honest and clear .

Good stuff! Although I think the title is a bit misleading and should be adapted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com