A competitor emailed me moments after I signed up to Stripe | Hacker News Reader

A competitor emailed me moments after I signed up to Stripe

ashdavies.net

148 pointsashdav87 comments

For those that aren't aware, there is a growing class of lead-generation startups which scrape websites and determine what services you're using.

My guess is that the company that contacted you is using one of these (Stripe requires your public key in the head of your site and linking to their JS). BuiltWith is one such service: http://builtwith.com ... NerdyData & Datanyze also: http://nerdydata.com, http://www.datanyze.com

Subscribers use these tools to find people who are trying out competing services (they are not cheap, BTW). Often, if a site only recently added JS code–for example, say, KissMetrics–you can assume they are still in the trial period. That gives you a window of time to try and sell them on your competing product. Or, if you sell a special WordPress plugin, you can use these services to find WordPress sites.

Stripe doesn't have a trial period per se, but its pretty easy to switch between the modern payment providers and if it was only recently installed, its safe to assume you don't have a lot of customers yet.

Yea, http://NerdyData.com offers an API for real-time webcrawling. They can find out each day who adds/removes certain codes. It's really interesting, I was part of their initial beta test program - cool stuff!

Based on the fact that he got the email 40 minutes after his query to Stripe I doubt any of these companies were involved.

To do a crawl across a meaningful percentage of the Internet and refresh this every 24 hours is hard enough even if you only capture the front page. Very few sites include stripe.js in the source on the front page. So you would need to crawl deep enough into a site to hit the checkout page and capture stripe.js in the head section which is exponentially more difficult.

Indexing your crawl and passing this off to a team to extract contact details and send it to a client so they can reach out all within 40 minutes I would say is nearly impossible. It is possible they already had his details but I cannot see anything on his site that would trigger a "likely to switch payment gateways" alert.

My guess is this was completely random. A good sales rep will make 60-100 outbound calls per day along with a bunch of emails. Multiply this by the number of outbound sales reps in the payments market and you have a lot of sales activity.

Ghostery my friend; and AdBlock Plus while we are at it. As someone who have worked in e-commerce, I'm keenly aware of the pixels that is "always watching you". So I don't want to be tracked and prefer that someone to be someone else.

Can this be explained with a birthday paradox? If there is a large number of people signing up to Stripe and a large number of people receiving spam emails from Stripe competitors, probability that some people will receive a spam email just after signing up to Stripe may be non-negligible.

I'd guess it's more to do with the OP is in a job that gets targeted with these types of ads. (Correctly it seems)

Combined with, there probably has been other emails previously but they were ignored since OP at that time had their head on different issues.

As a human a pattern was looked for and a pattern was found.

As above companies are tracking this sort of stuff and some sites get the email addresses of user who visit (from tracking data). So the 'coincidence' might be more contrived with a bit more targeting than just low level job data. Would need more info.

But I wouldn't call it a birthday paradox, it's not totally random.

I confess I've been trying a similar kind of thing attempting to promote a website of mine. I find people who've written about competitors and email them inviting them to try my site and asking for their thoughts. Is this scummy or is it acceptable? I'm hoping it's different because the pertinent material is public, rather than private like in the OP's case.

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Edit: I think in retrospect watty has a point, I've removed the links. I also didn't expect this comment to rise to the top, and it is kind of off-topic. Apologies.

I'd say that if you're using public info that they have chosen to share, e.g. blog posts, then acceptable. If using underhand tactics like tracking them via an ad network, then maybe scummy.

Sounds pretty above-the-board to me. They've publicly written about the subject and you've invited them to explore another option.

Thanks, I feel the same way and hope it's OK. It's just that, when it comes to marketing, even when I'm doing something I believe intellectually and ethically is OK, it sometimes gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I made a post in /r/productivity on reddit and everyone there was super nice. A couple of people suggested that I cross-post to a some other subreddits; I couldn't find the right way to say "I really appreciate the encouragement but I'm afraid I'll look like a spammer"

99% of marketing is either promoting a great product with little audience or polishing a turd (most times a mix of each). I've done both. It's a lot easier to sleep working on the first, but sometimes the second can be more fun.

Haven't tried your product yet, but it seems like you fall into the first half of that statement. It's ok to promote your hard work and you shouldn't feel bad about it.

Marketing isn't inherently spammy, don't overthink it

This is completely different. I think you knew that but saw this as an opportunity to (further) promote asoftmurmer.

I suppose the problem with this sort of thing is that it's turtles all the way down.

An opportunity well taken, too.

Mentioned the competitors too. I have no problem with the post.

Now your post is the only one that mentions his startup by name. Brilliantly played, I must say.

I think the point is to understand how a third party obtained the potential client's email.

whois

At least one of the domains linked on that site leaks his gmail account through it.

It's a fine gesture, although I would say the timing is interesting. They've already made a decision to go with someone. I guess it's better than waiting until they invest even more in that competitor's integration.

But I would much rather find out when people sign up to COMPLEMENTS of your service, and offer them your service as an addition instead of being combative :)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

"Is this scummy or is it acceptable?"

At the size you are at (you probably have a pretty small footprint?) I don't think it matters what you get as an answer from people on HN (or your friends or some blogger) but rather how would your target audience feel?

And more importantly even if they don't like it will that really impact the bottom line? Meaning will enough people care to stop using you and spread the word of your "scummy" practice? (So for example if you are promoting on HN then "live by the sword die by the sword" and you'd better care about appearing scummy. Otoh if you are selling hats to soccer mom's in the midwest it's a entirely different story, right?)

My feeling is you can't go around worrying about being "scummy or acceptable". First everyone has a different opinion of where that line is. And 2nd all those people with opinions on what you should do aren't going to pay your bills are they?

I remember back in the mid 90's people would ask "do people care if you ping them?" (meaning unix ping not "hey what's up") or not? I mean if they care what are they going to do?

I've done this too, and I don't think it's unethical if you're doing it in public forums. I try not to do it too much or be spammy about it... I just find public forums where people are looking for ways to do a certain thing and then suggest my own thing as an option.

A competitor didn't e-mail me moments after I signed up for Stripe. It's coincidence.

not necessarily. there's not enough context as to how they got to stripe.

Did they write the url in the address bar of the browser without any other context, or did they do something that signalled what they were going to do.

I bet #2.

Ironically, I found this on BlueSnap's website...

http://www.bluesnap.com/ecommerce/legal/prohibitions-and-dmc...

BlueSnap does not allow the use of any BlueSnap links and products in any type of spam activity. If you believe that a BlueSnap link was used in spam activity please submit a report to spam@bluesnap.com and include the relevant link/s and message/s.

Merchants and Affiliates are requested to review our guidelines on avoiding spam to help stay on the right side of the relevant legislation.

It seems clear that Stripe emailed the OP to undermine the competitor. They are the only ones to have his e-mail adress.

Or someone within Stripe, with access to the user-sign up list, is an affiliate with BlueSnap and is trying to make some extra money on the side.

An evil thought, and I'm fairly sure it isn't the case, but totally possible.

Sounds like a good way to end up in jail.

Jail? For what? Currently I have access to personal information for thousands of customers for the company I work for. I've never signed an employment contract regarding this data.

There's nothing legally stopping me from publishing all of that data, or selling it on the side. At least not to my knowledge.

Just think... there's at least one of someone like me at every service you use on the Internet.

You might want to revisit your employment agreement.

I would hope that is not true in the USA, but maybe you are right (depending on what you mean - I doubt you can publish SSNs and claim you had the right to do so).

I seriously doubt that publishing people's private info you got from your company would be legal based on European privacy laws (regardless what your company chose to have you personally sign).

I imagine going to jail is unlikely in any case. And I doubt it would be connected to your employment contract in any case: jail would likely be the result of some criminal offense you committed against the state, not against your employer.

Definitely not. That would be dishonest and stupid.

I too suspect it is coincidence but two questions to add to my database, one are you using the Chrome browser, and regardless of browser do you have any extensions that help you 'fill in forms' ?

Yes to Chrome, no to form fillers.

Thanks, the reason I ask is that there have been a couple of articles lately on how much form data Chrome stores. (a somewhat rabid piece is here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/10/10/google-c...) I keep wondering if that is an actual threat or not and if so how we could detect it.

See callmeed's comment above. Most likely that's the source.

As sanswork said have you asked them where they got your details from? It could just be a coincidence.

Or, when you said you 'played around with the [stripe] service' did you put any stripe code on public sites?

Waiting for their answer now. Haven't posted any stripe code publicly. Could be a very good coincidence.

Just random musings: say that you signed up at a random point in time within a two year period, and that they also e-mail people at a random point in time within a two year period. The odds of their e-mail arriving within 40 minutes of you signing up are then about 1 in 26,000. Low, but you'd expect it to happen to a few people.

They're presumably only open eight hours a day, so you can probably cut two thirds of that number. Also, did you consider the birthday paradox?

I'm not sure how the birthday paradox would apply here, since we're matching up two events per person, not matching up nearby events where you're looking for pairs among multiple people.

> Could be a very good coincidence

Literally the last two times I have text my wife suggesting pizza for dinner I have had an advertisement SMS from Dominos moments later. If it wasn't for the shocking state of Dominos tech (website and mobile app) I would think they had some crazy surveillance going on!

Some kind of pavlov's dog response? IE Dominos sends SMS marketing on a roughly predictable timetable, and on a couple of days those messages arrived late, causing you to subconsciously anticipate pizza news and suggest getting pizza?

Probably not, I'm talking out of my ass.

I hope so, that would be awesome.

Seems possible actually. Wasn't there just something yesterday on Dominos using pizza-smelling ink on DVDs? The DVD would heat up in the player and produce a pizza smell, inspiring hunger and hopefully a trip to Dominos. That's pretty dastardly. Timing advertisements seems to be much more in the realm of possibility.

With the current state of mobile app permissioning, I wouldn't be surprised if analytics companies are mining text message history for signals. This should be easy for you to test though.

Your cell phone provider could be selling them that stuff, seems like a really good revenue stream and easy to implement

Somehow this seems much more creepy than Google doing the same with emails.

Do you browse the web logged into Linkedin?

I bought medicine online one time. Moments later I received an email to purchase Viagra. Coincidence?

I had a similar experience with spotify/rdio. I personally don't think these emails are a coincidence

http://creativaldo.tumblr.com/post/73662726109/is-spotify-sp...

I think this is a clever marketing scheme by Stripe. Now hundreds of HN readers will sign up just to check if they get an email from BlueSnap. I know I did.

People who signed up for anything other than to use the service are of no value to Stripe. As a marketing consultant and someone who used to work in a marketing agency, I think many people here over-estimate the cleverness of marketers.

Why not a clever marketing scheme by BlueSnap? I never knew about BlueSnap before. After seeing this, spent a good 10 minutes on their website!

This actually would be brilliant. But for a different reason! It creates contrast between stripe and a spammy competitor. Makes you hate the spammer and love the company you signed up with.

We'd never betray the trust of our users by doing something crazy like that. We're as puzzled as the OP.

I wasn't entirely serious, but good to know! :)

Hmm, I know that when we bought an email list for our target demo we ended up with a couple of honeypot addresses and an e-mail from the source asking who got the list from, complete with legal threats if we didn't assist in their investigation. This is cheap enough that if you have concerns about insiders you might want to set something like that up.

Did you put any of the code on a site? There are services that will scan sites for snippets of competitors code and alert a company when someone is trying their service.

Nope, just signed up and left.

this title is misleading. 40 minutes is a very long time, hardly "moments after."

Considering the fact that I get about 3 postcards a week pushing merchant services and credit card processing, I think this is just a coincidence.

As a marketer, especially in the fast paced online world, if I had the ability to pull this strategy off, I wouldn't wait 40 minutes. I would pull the trigger instantly, and since it is spammy as it is, I would use a much more aggressive sell. (not that I would ever do this... I wouldn't!)

I see Blue Snap is running marketo on their site, so they clearly are doing marketing automation, and if they are at all sophisticated, they probably have some pretty advanced ways of deciding who to email, when.

For what it's worth that marketing message assumes you are already in production with someone else and transacting actively: "I do understand you may feel as though you are all set in this area" Rather than win your entire business away they want you to start using them for some payments. If they thought you were actively looking to add a PG for the first time (ie somehow knew you'd just signed up for Stripe) it would be different messaging. So I think you may have signed up with them in the past a ways back and they think of you as an already processing site with a gateway.

I've seen a startup here on HN that was doing exactly this thing. Would warn you when a client signed up on a competitor site. I think the data was leaked from some kind of analytics app.

I remember that too... do you remember the name?

EDIT: Found it here: http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/20/this-startup-tells-you-whe...

It's http://www.datanyze.com/

That would require that the OP put some code related to stripe on his site. He's said had not done that when he got the email.

"Every day, the company crawls millions of websites with its custom spider technology, searching for hints about what software each company is using..."

The lack of "Me too!" responses leads me to believe this is just a coincidence.

Curious how an article like this makes it to the #1 spot.

Probably a lot of people who watched The Good Wife last night and/or privacy conspiracy theorists.

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

A lot of people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate of shrimp" out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.

- Repo Man

I've not experienced this myself. But have you asked them where they got your contact info from? I'd be curious to know because any possibility I can think of (outside of you posting on twitter or your blog, etc) would be extremely questionable.

I've asked them, the person emailing has said they received it from a marketing department. Pushing for more info now.

I'm thinking really hard about this and I can't find anything I've shared that suggests I'm looking for a new payment gateway. Hence the post :)

you might have put your email address into a banner for some reason and when you started searching for payment gateways it passed your details on?

That is creepy. I'm not sure whether the publicity from the blog post is going to generate more or fewer customers for the Stripe competitor, though.

I've had this happen to me on different topics (IIRC it did happen with Stripe a month or two ago) way too often to attribute it to coincidence. My working assumption is that online privacy does not exist anymore.

With all these microphones and cameras attached to all the net enabled devices we use, it's a matter of time before offline privacy stops existing as well.

Email in 1985 must have felt weird too. Cheers, F

Without any other evidence you can't conclude that this is anything other than a coincidence.

Personally I would want to see some kind of smoking gun like "A competitor emailed me AT THE UNIQUE EMAIL ADDRESS THAT I JUST SIGNED UP TO STRIPE WITH" - otherwise the mail could have just been a coincidence and could have come from anywhere.

It is possible that Stripe divulges your contact info to some affiliate that has been, well, infiltrated by the competition. I would be surprised if you got any concrete info from the competitor, either way.

If I search for JSP hosting, I see ads for it all over after. Not surprising if his searches and browsing triggered some marketing system that managed to email him.

It's called re-marketing - the site you look at allows the ad network to track your visit to your site, then they show you ads for that site as you navigate the web. It's horrible but incredibly effective.

Retargeting.

Oddly enough, this happened with me and Mixpanel the other day. I signed up for Mixpanel, and just a few hours later got a cold email from someone at RJ Metrics

without further info I would guess this is remarketing in effect......if this person visited that competitor previously and they have remarketing system in place with google adwords or whatever...and have it set to track you to stripe then they know you're actively in the market and send a cold email..... this kind of adwords remarketing has only started to get mainstream more recently I'd say...

Remarketing works by adding a snippet of code to your own site to put a cookie on the visitor's browser, then the display network checking for that cookie and displaying your ad if it's present. It's not possible to remarket to another site's users, even underhandedly with the assistance of the company that drops these cookies, as stripe.com hasn't tagged their own site with any of those companies' code.

ad retargeting, or "stalker advertising". Cookie or whatever tracks movements, monitors for specific urls. When tagged client visits urls, system recognizes paying customers and sends "friendly heads up" email.

Off-topic: which blog engine is this ?

(I tried ctrl-s :)

(Because nice typo)

http://www.squarespace.com/

this is possible through datanyze, if I'm not wrong

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