Ethical Cold Outreach
blog.val.town
blog.val.town
That said, even YC (can't find the exact Dalton + Michael episode) encourages cold outreach. If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.
I had a product that got thousands of views from a Reddit post. Out of those, literally 0 clicked anywhere besides the page they landed on. I've been #2 on Product Hunt, 0 have actually used the product after clicking into it the first time.
Most products have a very tiny customer base, and they're not just casually browsing social media looking to find your exact product. You need to find these people and reach out to them directly.
Don't lie, but do little things that show them that you respect their time. Keep it short, tell them what the product is in plain English. Do some amount of research to qualify them as a potential customer. Try to tailor it to be relevant to them. Put your real name behind it. Ask them for feedback even if they wouldn't pay for your product. And don't follow up more than once or maybe twice.
It sucks. No one likes doing it. But if something is actually relevant for me, I would at least be curious enough to take a meeting. Unfortunately the only cold emails I get is from dev pod-shops or venture debt type people which are uninteresting.
Even with the AI thing, I think YouTube and Instagram models are improved so much that they are now taking your content to the right audience, unlike before. They used to serve it to random 10 people, then used to see the engagement, and then improve on that. Now they are on different paths where they are doing psychology- and interest-based targeting, and cold outreach does exactly the same. Even if it is the slowest, it is the most powerful as well, one of the most powerful.
I get a lot of office cleaning / janitorial spam (I don't have an office) alongside the dev shop spam. Just checked my junk SMS folder, I had 5 SMS messages for "fundraising" for a company gone 10 years ago. It is non-stop.
The same can be said for all sorts of activities, from the illegal and unethical to the mundane.
Although, to be fair, you're right. Which is why I actively make it my goal to make doing cold sales outreach more costly to the companies doing it than if they had done nothing at all. A BDR cold emailing me is a pretty good way to make sure your software does not get considered by my organization, and I'm very likely going to cost their privacy/compliance team more time than they spent contacting me unwantedly in the first place.
It really shouldn't be that hard, I even would do the work of "hey this is our expected usage, I have already adjusted for an overage buffer, how much?".
What might this look like for you?
(I don’t cold email except thanks or say questions btw, but I am curious!)
Come to find out that most HN commenters don’t know/care what “cold calling/email” actually entails, and that “networking” is somehow equivalent and equally miraculous!
Yup. That’s why rape and murder is so popular.
Then companies could just go and grab a lead list from there, with some metadata, and if too many people report it as spam (you could use a private relay on the site, for example, like mailinator) you lose access. Good citizens stay. And charge a nominal fee to enforce the reputation system.
I'm sure this is one of those "congratulations you have reinvented system Z" problems
I don't know how many times I've been to something like a niche clothing retailer and they ask me to join their mailing list for a discount and I think hey why not, I should come back in 6 months or a year and see what's new, maybe they'll let me know about their Labor Day sale. And of course they immediately proceed to email me 5 times a DAY because maybe I'm ready to shop now, when I wasn't at 2:00 pm. Unsubscribing only solves 20% of the problem because of course they subscribed me to 5 different daily lists and you need to unsubscribe separately. And, of course, if you don't do it quickly enough it will be 6, 7, 8, 10, 20 lists.
They're not human. They really can't help it.
No, buddy, I do actually know what email I want to receive.
The people who are doing this don't care about you though. They're playing a numbers game and if this form of "communication" proves to be more than a flash-in-the-pan, it would be an indication that the return realized exceeds the cost by a meaningful enough margin.
It's the same thing with most of the popular scams today. Many people look at them and wonder, "How did anyone fall for that?", but they still exist because they work on enough of the people to make them viable.
So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?
If I don't know them, no, they may not.
The best you will ever be able to do is (try to) ignore unwanted communication.
The more common scenario is that I waste more of their time than my own.
The internet is global. A person sitting in Palo Alto, a shack in a rural village in Southeast Asia, etc. doesn't care about German law and is, in all but a few exceptional cases, beyond its reach in the real world.
Let's say some company or "entrepreneur" sitting in an office in Palo Alto or in his house in the Philippines wants to sell a SaaS app they vibe coded in a week.
They use AI to create a marketing email and list of targets. They blast it out and it lands in the inbox of some dude in Germany.
Do you really think the company or individual is going to ever face any consequences for sending the guy an email?
The bottom line is that in the real world, some random "entrepreneur" or SME sending an unsolicited "Hey software guy, I have a service you might be interested in" email to somebody in Germany isn't ever going to cause them trouble.
I will stop here, the whole back and forth feels unproductive
But that also doesn't really matter to this discussion - the law existing provides evidence that not wanting to receive unsolicited corporate communication is not a fringe opinion.
The problem is way more people are convinced (or just hoping, or just setting off an automated system that is even less discriminating than that) that I am interested in their product than I have inclination to check their pitch out, especially given their to-date 0% success rate.
Not once in my entire 40 years on this planet has a single ad or cold outreach been welcome. Every single one is full of lies and partial information that is vastly inferior to me going out and researching products that I want.
I don't care what you think I'll be interested in. I might be, but you're too biased for me to trust you to give me reliable information about the product. Leave me alone.
Otherwise you’re just stating your preferences to internet strangers who have no idea who you are. What else don’t you like, pineapple on pizza?
Sure, let's entertain the possibility that you're one of the not-very-intelligent people who thinks ads are there to help them, and you like having ads shown to you. That's great for you, have at it! If you want to spend your money on shit you don't need from companies that spend their money on advertising instead of producing quality products, that's your prerogative. That doesn't mean it's okay to ram ads into the face of everyone else who doesn't want ads. And outside of the self-serving Hacker News bubble where you wrongly assume anything profitable must also be popular, most people don't like ads.
To borrow your analogy--sure, me not liking pineapple on pizza is just a preference. But advertising is like if they offer free pizza on the condition that it has pineapple on it, and if I pick the pineapple off they have someone follow me around and try to put the pineapple back on the pizza as I put it in my mouth, and when I decide I'm going to pay for pizza to avoid the pineapple guy, they still put pineapple on the pizza, and people follow me around trying to put pineapple on the pizza that's in my lunchbox and sneak into my house and put pineapple on the pizza in my fridge. And at some point you have to admit that while not liking pineapple on pizza is just my preference, maybe my preference is valid and you pineapple on pizza people need to leave me the fuck alone.
For the record, I like pineapple on pizza.
But I get a log of "we noticed your website isn't ranking in Google" spam which is not.
And there's a bit of truth to that, for new products - people don't know about it yet. But it quickly goes from awareness to persuasion, then lies, and finally mindless repetition of a logo and tagline.
The endgame of ads is not information flow, it is programming the emotions and memory of the "audience."
Yeah, I can't wait to go back to being able to trust everything I read.
I imagine for some people it can be kind of hard to tell in this case, but even for someone not in the known for the power of AI made stuff like me there are red flags. The blur of the background where "Chase" is doesn't seem to match a "natural" aperture taken from a camera and even the perspective seems odd. Granted, you could say it can be just a generated background from zoom or something, but there are no visible artifacts when he moves, whereas you can see them on any zoom call when someone applies that effect. Also the timing in his speech can change dramatically all of a sudden for no reason whatsoever.
I'm really dumb about marketing stuff, as with most things, so I can't think of any reason you'd prefer to pull out all of this stuff instead of doing something like the article suggested - being honest and stating that the message you are getting is generated by a bot or something.