You Should Probably Send More Email Than You Do | Hacker News Reader

You Should Probably Send More Email Than You Do

kalzumeus.com

191 pointsspatulon78 comments

Articles like this always bring out the part of HN that simply can not understand normal people.

It's kind of funny that as a community we make a bunch of web apps paid for by ads, yet all swear we don't click on ads. We all swear that we don't read spam, yet somehow half the businesses on HN heavily use email marketing.

There are people out there that click on ads. There are people out there that click through emails. If you don't understand that, and your competitors do, you will get crushed.

Not really. He is offering incentives that normal people wouldn't like in order to get hackers emails.

I totally would want to do something with email if my target was normal people.

I write code, and subscribe to a lot of newsletters.

When I get an email that provides me with some immediate value, and then pitches me to exchange some money to deliver more value, I'm probably going to open up my wallet.

Peepcode is a great example. I'm not going to spend time checking back to see if there's new content, but I occasionally get emails for them advertising a new screencast. It benefits me ("Hey, I'm partially interested in X, and I can get a good baseline understanding of X for an hour of my time and $Y"), and I know for a fact I'm not the only "hacker" who gets these emails.

I have no idea why Patrick gives this amount of value-drenched information away for free. What's encouraging is that the advice has gone over the heads of the majority of commenters here, and no matter how hard he tries, his advice on A/B testing doesn't seem to be catching on at large.

I don't have a product to sell (I'm working on it!), but I've found a fantastic way to monetize patio11s free advice. The money I've made (and saved) by doing this will feed and clothe my unborn child, ETA November.

1. Read everything he writes about helping people make money. Automating SEO, split testing and now email marketing (http://startupbook.net by Rob Walling is also mostly about email marketing).

2. Use that advice to help people make money. You can do this at work, or with your freelance clients (neither will mind you trying to help them make more money). Rather than theorize about whether his advice works or not, actually try and see if it moves the right needles. You will be pleasantly surprised.

3. Read the stuff he writes about consulting and having the confidence to charge higher fees. Then go be a consultant and start charging high fees for the advice that you got from patio11.

You may feel bad about taking patio11s advice and selling it for a daily rate. I did. So I send all clients that I talk to about implementing basic split tests links to pertinent blog posts on his website. To date, not one has shown signs of reading them.

They're a great deal more excited when I install visual website optimizer and a full 20% more people click through when we change button copy from "Start Here" to "Get Your Widget".

Somewhat relevant anecdote: I've recently been working with a client that implements many of of the tactics and techniques that patio11 describes for making more money. This client happens to be richer than Croesus. Their process is centred around conversion (i.e. conversion parity on a 10% sample is a post-QA requirement for rolling out new site functionality). They have entire departments with 10+ employees dedicated to SEO + Content, Email Marketing and PPC.

Every month, they get richer than Croesus with a higher conversion rate. Unless I win the lottery, all the money I'm likely to make in my twenties won't amount to the average monthly increase they see in revenue.

Here's the beauty of this system: you're becoming a local authority on these topics, but your (and probably many other people's) authority is patio11. What does this mean? At least two things:

1) History will probably remember patio11 as a Great Guy

2) People who are really interested, will ask where you got your inspiration, and your reply will most likely be something like "there's this guy called patio11 on the internet...". These will serve to further the impact of patio11s ideas.

Without having any sources or immediate examples, I'm pretty sure this is how things have worked for milleniums. It's quite a robust system that's good both for you, your audience and the "originator".

Naturally, this assumes patio11 can still pay his bills, which I think he can, anything else would be a injustice given his expertise.

Suffice it to say while I'm touched by the concern you don't have to worry about me being able to make rent.</understatement>

I didn't mean to imply that you couldn't - it was meant as a general statement of people in a similar position, though my writing didn't really make that clear.

Everybody needs a hobby, mine is apparently teaching people. It makes me enormously happy that you and your family are better off after having implemented advice I wrote. Thumbs up.

Sadly, I think Patrick's going to receive a lot of but I don't like receiving email -type responses from people here who just don't want to understand that they personally do not represent the average computer user.

It's an important point: just because you personally don't like something doesn't mean that everybody else is the same.

It's also equally important to apply some filters when taking advice; my favourite example being, by and large, ignore pricing advice from people who would never buy your product at any price!

If he didn't want people talking about their own preferences when receiving e-mail, he probably shouldn't have dedicated an entire section of the article to telling us that we should sign up for his mailing list and how awesome it will be for us when we do.

I believe that's kind of the point. Despite the fact that you hate email so much, there will be value to both parties if you do sign up. That's the only way to prove you're "wrong" about email. :)

Except the so-called value that we're supposed to get from his mailing list consists of exactly the sort of items most of us want to avoid.

I respect that you might not like some things I offer, which is why I describe them accurately and then deliver exactly what it says on the tin. My favorite sushi guy sells lots of raw fish attached to rice. There are cute little pictures of raw fish attached to rice to help you decide whether raw fish attached to rice is for you. If raw fish attached to rice is indeed not for you, my sushi guy will not think less of you. You may believe most people seeing raw fish attached to rice pictures would be uninterested in that. My sushi guy, if you asked him, would tell you that he really doesn't need to sell to most people, he only has to sell people who love raw fish attached to rice, and as to the topic of whether anyone could possibly want something disgusting as raw fish attached to rice, he might just modestly shrug while standing in the middle of the building that raw fish on rice built.

Yes, I get that not everything has to appeal to everybody. But this article got posted here, which is basically inviting this community to comment on it.

I'm curious what you think the proposed value is and what exactly you want to avoid. (For serious, I'm curious, not saying you're wrong.)

Obviously, if you're not in the business of making money from software or websites, you're not the target audience, but at first glance, I kind of read your statement as "I want to avoid making money".

Basically, the whole "free video that will teach you how to earn $10,000 for two hours of work" thing just screams "spam". Maybe this is legitimate, but the way it's presented is really unattractive.

> Have you ever heard the phrase “You can’t judge a book by its cover”? (...) it is an empirically observable fact that most people, when presented with a book, will judge it by its cover.

But isn't the phrase "You shouldn't judge a book by its cover"? (And even when "can't" is used, what's meant is often "shouldn't").

Of course people judge books by their cover; they also judge people by the clothes they wear, their height or skin color. Should they?

It depends. Prejudice is our own little Bayesian filtering; it works sometimes but it's not "pure": it tends to have a strong effect on reality (for example, CEOs are mostly of above-average height: not because being tall makes you a good CEO but because we expect tall people to be leaders).

> 99% of geeks will report never having buying anything as a result of an email

bought (just to show that I read at least this far!)

Also:

> so a) I created a mailing list, you should probably sign up and a) I would like to explain why your business should probably send more email than it is right now.

You probably meant "a) ... b) ..."

BTW, am I the only one who feels like this is just a squeeze page?

If this was what happened when I set out to write a squeeze page I'd be out of a job. https://training.kalzumeus.com is the "squeeze page" for my mailing list. Prominent stylistic elements to note: clear call to action dominating the page, lack of several thousand words linking to other people's businesses while trying to convince you to do something other than signing up for the email list.

>it is an empirically observable fact that most people, when presented with a book, will judge it by its cover.

Of course we do. At least for a first cut judgment - after all the cover has the book's title, author, and usually a blurb; that is usually enough information to either discard it or decide to take a closer look.

I judge books by their covers. Heck, I judge a lot of books by their spines. Publishers put a lot of work into designing book covers so that you can, in fact, get a pretty good idea of their content, tone and style based on their cover.

For instance, compare

"The Planet Wizard" http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Plan...

"Taken By You" http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n16/n82162.jpg

The actual maxim should be "Judging a book by its cover actually has an extremely high success rate and can be safely done in many cases, however it has a finite failure rate especially in terms of determining the quality of a book and so should be avoided in cases where incorrect judgement will cause problems".

PS. Yes, I know those examples were entirely unnecessary, I just wanted to take the opportunity to show off some amusingly terrible book covers.

You shouldn't judge a book by its spine. Those are usually optimized for bookstore clerks to organize the book into the right area, and might show not really be related to the content very much.

As an extreme case, I judge books before I even see their spines. I judge books by their location in the bookstore and don't even walk into the aisle to catch a glimpse of the spine. Maybe somewhere in the "Romance" section of the bookstore there's a book that would really appeal to me, but I'll never see it.

Sometimes I even judge an entire store-ful of books without looking at 'em. I've already judged the entire contents of my local "Anarchist Bookstore" without setting foot inside the place.

There's thousands of bookstores in China that I've never even seen, and I know I won't enjoy the books inside them. Look at me, I'm dismissing billions of books that I have never seen and will never see, simply because I suspect they're probably written in languages I don't understand!

Anyway, if I ever get to the point where I'm judging a book by actually looking at its cover then that book is already getting way more scrutiny from me than most.

This really only works for cheap commercial genre-material. This doesn't work for quality works of literature.

Which leads back to the original point.

Given that you see a jacket with a buxom woman in a skimpy dress being embraced by a leprechaun with Fabio-pecs, would you assume that this fact has no predictive value with regards to the question "Is this, in fact, a quality work of literature?" No, of course you'd assume it is pulp, which is why people whose business is selling quality works of literature don't package it as pulp.

Most of us are not in the business of selling anonymous writing written by people of no particular expertise which is designed to have a shelf-life of twenty minutes and yet we spend extraordinarily amounts of time producing things in a cover which says exactly that. We should, instead, devote more of our limited resources to creating work in the cover that says "important things you should act upon immediately from the people you trust more than anyone in the world about this topic."

Only if it's true, though. If you try to sell pulp in a package more suitable for serious litterature, you won't reach readers who are interested in pulp and you will upset people who seek serious books.

I think the real problem you're trying to address is the lack of confidence of programmers into their own writings; their bullshit detector is too sensitive when placed too close to the source.

Ah, but I can tell the cheap genre material by the cover. So it works, after all :)

actually, old (~ pre-70s) sf cover art is a particularly bad choice of examples - the covers often bore very little relation to the actual contents of the book.

Really? Because if there's no near-naked metal-clad babe tied upside-down to the snout of a space dragon I'll be so pissed off.

"The aphorism 'you can't tell a book by its cover' originated in the times when books were sold in plain cardboard covers, to be bound by each purchaser according to his own taste. In those days, you couldn't tell a book by its cover. But publishing has advanced since then: present-day publishers work hard to make the cover something you can tell a book by."

--- http://paulgraham.com/javacover.html

This is interesting, but pedantic. Many words have a well-understood meaning that is only loosely connected to their etymology.

Better to say that "present-day publishers work hard to make the cover something you can sell a book by."

People do say "can't", as in "can't [accurately] judge a book". This of course leads to the advice that one should not do so, but the phrasing with the word "can't" explains why.

About email, what I feel is that:

- I hate to receive unsolicited email: from people I don't know or businesses I've never heard of; I always make sure to hit "spam" in Gmail for those

- at the same time, I feel I don't get enough email from businesses where I'm already a customer. For example, I bought custom-made shirts from Youtailor a year ago; they never emailed me since last year to inform me of new fabrics or new products, or simply to remind me that the delivery time is 5 weeks and that if I want a shirt for a given time in the year I'd better order 5 weeks in advance. I have hundred of stories like these.

On the other hand, I can't stand unsolicited emails from companies I do business with. My first action is to click the unsubscribe link, and if that doesn't work (quite often the case), add the company to my spam filter and hope that their invoice emails still get through.

Unsolicited email is a scourge upon cyberspace. If you as a company want to send me periodic emails, ASK me first. I'll probably say no, but who knows? I might just say yes.

OTOH, I like receiving most email, excepting for the really low quality "v1agra 4 u" spam, or Nigerian 419 scams or whatever. But well written, non scammy email, which is pitching a product or service that I actually might have a need for, doesn't actually bother me at all. And the emails from companies I'm already doing business with are usually very valuable. Amazon, for example, "knows" my musical taste well enough to email me and let me know when there is, for example, a new Motorhead album out. That's cool. Mondo cool.

I think the title is misleading. Maybe "You would make more money if you sent more email"? I certainly believe that mass email marketing works, in the same way I presume that someone must be making money off all the Viagra spam that gets sent. But there is quite a leap from "You would make more money if you sent Viagra spam" to "You should should send more Viagra spam".

More and more small local businesses are sending me spam, and I don't like it. Many of these businesses are small enough that I feel socially awkward unsubscribing if it requires sending a polite personal email saying "Please remove me". Instead, I just angrily delete everything they send. While I may be an outlier, and almost definitely am not your target market, be cautious taking silence as a positive response.

>> More and more small local businesses are sending me spam, and I don't like it.

Weird, where are you based? I'm in the US, and I've never had a local business get my email address without me giving it to them. (Of course I gave my email expecting to receive email from them; otherwise, why bother?)

I'm in the Bay Area, and run a business myself. My address is listed as a contact with a number of associations. Some of other members of these groups seem to think that adding the full list of contacts to their mailing list is a service to the community. Some are companies that I've corresponded with in the past, who about once a year seem to take their entire list of emails and slam them onto to their new mailing list. Others (recently a spate of real estate companies) seem to have found my address by some other means.

Sometimes I've given them the address for some other purpose like notifying me for when a special order comes in or to register for a specific event. I'm not using "spam" in quite the legal sense --- I'm sure it could be argued that I have a pre-existing relationship with some of these businesses. But unless I have explicitly checked a box that says "please send me email about your business until I tell you to stop", I consider these unsolicited commercial messages to be spam.

There's a difference between expecting to receive an email (e.g. an order confirmation) from someone, and expecting to receive an endless stream of emails from them.

I agree with him about email, but not about RSS feeds. I've trimmed my RSS reader to remove all the blogs I rarely read. The TechCrunch slurry pipe was one of the first to go, but I also removed lots of blogs that did occasionally have good articles but drowned it out with too much noise.

I still subscribe to over 40 blogs, but most of them update very infrequently and the articles are consistently great. (Ben Horowitz, Gabriel Weinburg, Venkatesh Rao, etc). The people who do update frequently generally produce short-yet-high-value content (Sebastian Marshall, Josh Spodek). In fact I often find run out of good stuff to read pretty quickly.

"I have probably told a hundred anecdotes like “I just did an A/B test and increased software sales by 70% with 99% statistical confidence. The change was a two-character configuration tweak that I dismissed on a hunch six years ago.” (That totally happened this May. Ask me for details later.)"

Would now be a good time to ask for details?

It's worth talking about in a wee bit more detail, but

@new_user.card_limit_for_free_trial = ab_test("user-card-limit-may-2012", [8, 15], :conversion => "purchase")

gives away a bit of it. (That's literally all the code. The old default was 15.)

Funnily enough, I mentioned I might do that test eventually on HN ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3864079) and at the time panned its likelihood of success. Shows what I know, for the 495th time with A/B testing.

Interesting. I remember you talking about how it likely wouldn't make much of a difference, because almost all parents have less than eight kids, and almost all teachers have more than 20, so the number of people who'd be induced to buy the software by an eight card limit shouldn't really be much higher than the number who'd need more than 15 cards, anyway. Any theories on why it ended up mattering after all?

Hard to disagree with this statement: most people read all their email

And: most people miss most of their feeds/blog posts

Which is the incentive for true spam, but if you have something useful to tell your associates and customers, you aren't spam right?

I have the impression that he's trying to glamorize spam. I suppose it also depends on the concept you have of what's spam.

For me, if I receive a marketing e-mail from a company that I never made direct contact with, that's spam. I don't care if they have a "commercial agreement" and got my e-mail from a "legitimate" vendor; if I haven't specifically subscribed for updates from you, you're spamming me, and I will not care about your "content".

He makes a point of saying that this is a marketing strategy and that we should not be outraged because someone is trying to sell us something. But this is similar to someone knocking on your door to sell stuff; it's no illegal, but it's annoying and I hate you for doing that. I like my personal e-mail to be personal, and I hate having to filter out the garbage I never subscribed to.

If I want to buy something, I'll go and search for it, or I'll ask someone about it, but I will not look in my e-mail to see if I ever got an e-mail from someone saying they sell it.

It's not really the same as someone knocking on my door. It's much less intrusive and it's something I can deal with on my own time.

When someone knocks on my door it's usually around dinner time, and just because of my general demographics it's probably also not likely to be something I am interested in. I have no interest in buying cleaning products (and giving my credit card information) from some random person who walked up to my house.

I do however have an interest in new clothing styles from a store I shop at frequently or as in Patrick's example new learning materials he is putting out. Also, email can be dealt with when I am ready to deal with it and it's pretty easy to just click delete, delete, delete. I personally find it much harder to turn away (although I will do it) a desperate looking person standing on my doorstep.

You've misunderstood him. He's not suggesting that you buy email addresses from vendors; he's suggesting that you establish the relationship that opts in email addresses yourself. There is obviously nothing spammy about allowing people to subscribe to your mailing list.

You're making quite an assumption here... that you're consciously aware of all the decisions you make in a day -- purchase decisions or otherwise. You're saying everything you own or have ever owned was the result of you proactively seeking out each item. This comes across as very naive.

As I understand it, spam is unsolicited email. He will email you if and only if you ask him to.

I realize I'm not representative, but I had to seriously consider whether I should sign up for this a week or so ago (I did, and it's great content). I hate getting "extra" email, other than direct personal email. I filter mailing lists to folders which I read even less than RSS feeds (which, for my top 10-20, I read pretty seriously). I also am much less likely to "action" a ~15 page email than virtually any other form -- the only worthwhile long emails I get are document attachments, which I save and read separately. Pretty much any email containing text over 3 paragraphs is something I don't want to read (usually, from crazy people).

Email is also a pain to refer back to. I don't need a SaaS pricing insight right now. I will need it in 2 weeks. If it were on a blog or in a feed reader, I'd bookmark it. As email, it goes into some kind of grey area of read email which I'll have to find in Lucerne or something later.

Plus, the patio11 emails are "moral equivalent of your password" to forward, which kills the one advantage of email for me (easy forwarding). A web url which I can copy from my address bar is a lot more tolerable.

It's reasonable to do all this to me if either I'm non-representative or that it makes it way easier for you to monetize. I'd consider sending email myself since I'm sure one of those is true, but I still would be a lot happier paying $x/yr for the secret patio11 email-blog feed. I guess I could figure out a way to move the incoming mail into Google Reader or Instapaper.

Its not that people hate receiving mail, they just hate mail that tries to make a quick buck out of them.

You should really email your customers and prospects. But don't just send them a boring borchure. Approach them in a personal way. Ask them what is bugging them at the moment? Offer to help. Give them some love in the form of an email.

I've been emailing people from HN for about a month. Everyone responds. They all just keep the conversation going as if we were old friends. Some even go out of their way to help me build my startup.

How do I do it? I really care about them. Every time I contact somebody, it is because I think they are someone worth knowing. Not for networking connections, but as a person.

Treat your customers in the same way. Talk to them. Be friendly. I know this is hard for some people to do. It used to be so hard for me to do it. But I realized that people want to deal with those who relate to them. In fact, thats my biggest marketing weapon: I focus on making a connection with people. To really interest myself in their dealings. The sales just happen by themselves after that.

Note: This does sound like a lot of self-help books. I know. And it doesn't work with everybody, because not everybody likes you. But it works with a lot of people. I'd rather be mistaken for a friendly fool, than for an arrogant know-it-all.

Do a quick exercise. Click on the usernames in this thread. Find someone who posts their email on their profile. Send them a message with the title: "Just saying hello from HN". Inside, say hello, and ask them what they have been up to. Everyone will answer. Everyone.

So my story is, I once started a blog. I added an RSS feed and everything. As soon as I showed it to a few friends, one of the first responses: "How do I get this via email??". That's when I learned that most of the world still likes to receive things they care about via email, and don't care about RSS at all.

That's when I had the same realization as Patrick. Email is awesome. If I care about something, I used to run circles to remind myself to check it out when it became more important to me. Now, I just sign up via email, and it saves a lot of cycles.

And hey, if I don't care about it anymore, I get rid of it. We're at the point, with spam filters and legal forces, where 99% of what pops into my inbox, I can make sure never gets there again if I don't want it. To most things, unsubscribing works (it has to by law). The few things it doesn't work for are probably not getting past your spam filter anyway.

I disagree. I only "like mail" when it's sent to at most three people. All the rest is unsubscribed to or I'll ask the sender to remove me.

Mail isn't made for broadcasting in my opinion. Aggregator sites like forums and blogs work much better with commenting, tagging, even liking etc.

If you are accurately reporting your preferences (and hey, you might be!), you are accurately reporting preferences which many people do not share with you. Those people are numerous enough such that nearly every software company would profit from giving the option to have their preferences catered to.

Another thought to the difference in email and news aggregators; If I want to read a blog post later (but am busy now) I need to mark it in some way to remember to get back to it later. My email inbox, on the other hand, keeps it there for me till I read it.

> (The predicted future value of a customer is an odd duck for many SaaS companies. I’ll sketch out the shape of the curve some time. It’s a weird snake that requires a bit of explanation.)

I'd be very interested in hearing that bit.

Sorry Patrick, you couldn't be more wrong.

I always read the articles that pop up in you feeds, if at all possible. Even if they are long. There are few others I do this for.

I don't do it for all feeds, and I unsubscribe if I feel like they haven't posted sufficient high quality stuff as of late.

On the other hand I dread getting an email newsletter. Most are deleted or marked as spam on sight.

You know that emails are worth less too, or you wouldn't need to bribe with great content.

I realise I am not the average user, but the average user doesn't need to know how to improve his software either...

Best thing I learned from this? "Please confirm that you want that free video and other emails from me" is a much better subject line than the standard "Confirm subscription".

"Give me your email address and I’ll send you things that you’ll enjoy. For example, immediately after you confirm your email address, I’ll send you a link to watch a free 45 minute training video on improving the first run experience of your software."

This is satire, right?

I don't know, but I can't take anything seriously when "you should" is in the title.

You should stop downvoting me.

You should try to be constructive on this forum.

It's one thing for someone to say "you should" for an entirely self-serving purpose (e.g. "you should follow me on Twitter"). It's an entirely different thing for someone to offer suggestions that may be counter-intuitive and deserve further exploration. You should learn to appreciate the difference, and think for yourself before venting.

There is no difference. "Should" is a word used by people insecure in their beliefs who feel the need to convince others that they're correct solely for the purpose of self-affirmation.

I am able to put forth new ideas into the world without convincing others that my ideas (and by extension myself) are acceptable, and others should be too.

Oddly enough, by actually giving an in-depth explanation of my beliefs and putting forth an idea I believe deserves further exploration, I will no doubt be downvoted anyway. So why would I care about being constructive in a place that rewards popular ideas and punishes unpopular (although possibly valid) ideas?

You would have taken the article more seriously if he had simply said "send more email"? By phrasing it as a suggestion and not a command, that indicates a lack of confidence?

Yes, actually. Whenever someone says "You should do X" I immediately have a gut reaction to NOT do X. If it's phrased as "When I'm doing X, my Y increases by 20%" I find that much more palatable.

Telling me I should do something is a lot more annoying to me than presenting the information you're going to tell me anyway, and letting me make my own decision.

You should have added this to the top comment. ;)

I'm not at all sure why you would think that is satire. If you're his target audience (people who build web-based software), that 45 minute video is quite valuable. Keep in mind, this is someone who does consulting on just that topic, at a good price, so getting his opinion on this topic for 45 minutes is valuable.

I have no idea who this person is. I just know that his article basically says, sign up for my mailing list and I will give you a free video that will tell you how to earn $10,000 for just two hours of work. Maybe it's completely legitimate, I don't know, but it certainly appears to be one step removed from "housewife earns $500/hour from home!" ads.

To regular HN readers, he's known. As he mentions in the article, he appears here frequently as a commenter. Generally, anything he writes ends up on the homepage of HN. He's one of the more respected members of the HN community.

Funny, this is just about the last place I'd expect to be told to pay attention to the author and not the message.

If you think "sign up for my mailing list and I will give you a free video that will tell you how to earn $10,000 for just two hours of work" is the one sentence summary, then I'd say you really missed the message. His own email list is certainly more a side note and one example, than anything to do with the point of the article.

I'm reading the transcript right now and it's already given me several ideas on how to improve my web application. Just because you're sarcastic doesn't mean the whole world is.

I don't send more email because I personally don't like to get that kind of mail. (not saying everyone needs to do this).

I just don't like getting the mail the article mentions. Quote from article: "[Give me your email address] (link) and I’ll send you things that you’ll enjoy. For example, immediately after you confirm your email address, I’ll send you a link to watch a free 45 minute training video on improving the first run experience of your software."

How many of you clicked and signed up?

edit: Several people downvoted me (fair enough) but did anyone sign up to the guy's link?

edit: elsewhere in thread there's a valid point about not everyone being like us. this is ok, though I don't know anyone who likes getting this type of mail. anyone?

I signed up. (I would read Patrick's blog, but I don't use rss, so email is way better for me.)

Howdy. I'm the guy.

So, you're pretty much exactly who I wanted to reach with the second half of this post, because there is a great gap between a) your prior prediction of reality and b) the actual state of reality. The actual state of reality is "350 emails submitted in the last hour, approximately 60% confirmed."

This is useful signal for you, because the next time you have to make a similar prediction about the nature of reality, where that prediction might be consequential, you will ideally make a better prediction. All HNers who run a business have to make predictions like "I have a limited budget in terms of time, focus, and resources. If I spend effort on getting permission to email customers and then emailing them, will that do good things for the business?"

You might have had incomplete data prior to making your prediction of reality. Here's some things which are probably material to that prediction which would have suggested biasing it in the favor of more confirmed opt-ins.

1) I've spent a wee bit of time on HN for the last three years or so, and some folks around here find that I say helpful things.

2) People will, generally, leap at the opportunity to get something which is presented as being something of value. (Covered, in depth, in the blog post.)

3) A lot of people -- including people who are very similar to you in many ways -- would happily ask to receive email if that were communicated to them as being something of value from someone they trusted.

There's other things which would have suggested guessing a lower number than one might have otherwise:

1) The call to action in this blog post is not graphically prominent. (See my other comment on this thread regarding a squeeze page, which means a page designed to encourage conversions to an email submission. This page is very much not a squeeze page.)

2) You have to read things, go to a separate page, and then take action.

3) The list requires double opt-in (the first opt-in is giving your email address, the second is clicking a link in an introductory email to you saying "Yes, I want to receive email from you"), which will always and everywhere decrease uptake versus single opt-in.

Thank you for this detailed reply. You've certainly convinced me to at least weigh the option more carefully. (And you're right, I never would have predicted that many confirmed emails off of that link, in part for the reasons you cite about prominence etc. And my low prediction was even though I knew that HN traffic numbers, just in terms of number of hits to the submitted page, could be potentially staggering. I thought your link would have very few takers despite the extra traffic to the page it's on.)

I think one thing that is missing is that there is not an obvious social norm of how many emails are absolutely okay. (e.g. if you bought something from me this year, is it okay to email you once a month? once every two months? twice a year? weekly?) wonder if you have any thoughts about this. (Sorry if I missed this in the post.)

I'm just one datapoint, but Patrick has built up enough goodwill capital over the years that it took me about eight seconds from seeing the announcement on his twitter feed to signing up for his list.

I signed up. If I don't like it, I trust Patrick enough to just take me off the list again.

In the past I have subscribed to quite a few newsletters and mailing lists like this. Some are great, most I dropped because they sent too much irrelevant stuff. To manage this all list-mails get sorted into a different folder so they don't clogg up my inbox, which works very well for me - it doesn't activate the "oh, new mail, let's see what they want" feeling, it's more like looking at blogs that I read regularly.

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