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I understand that you want the startup to interact with the comments and I also understand you don't want them to miss an opportunity of receiving and answering feedback, but I'm wondering if it would make more sense to have these automated messages come from a Product Hunt twitter account that's not associated to a person. I believe this would solidify that it's an automated message.

I get the feeling that you're trying to play the messages off as not being automated as they come from Erik, but people already know they're automated. The gig is up. You could simply create an account such as "ProductHuntNotifier" or equivalent and remove any ambiguity.

I still think that the messages are both relevant and important.

You're in a unique position where you can even manually add and promote new startups to Product Hunt yourselves followed by automating a tweet out to the founder(s) and growth hack user acquisition that way. This seems to be the approach you're taking. I do applaud the fact you go so far as to do the legwork of finding the twitter accounts associated with the startup; that task is by no means automated. Most people can't take this approach as they have nothing beneficial to offer the user they're tweeting to.

Because there's some value add to what they're doing, I'm not sure I'd say it's a cut and dry case of calling it spam given it's not fully automated and the startups in question are getting promoted. It seems mutually beneficial in many ways.

We should probably find a way to streamline this outreach but right now it's entirely manual.

If we can't find the founder's Twitter handle, we send a message to the startup/product's Twitter account.

Being in YC does not guarantee that the companies will use ethical marketing strategies, unfortunately.

Remember the InstallMonetizer incident while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711

Or the rapgenius fiasco

It does a better job than most, though. InstallMonetizer incident involved YC staff contacting the founders and looking into it. They also implemented this: http://blog.ycombinator.com/founder-ethics http://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/

AirBnB spammed craigslist, etc.

I actually think it's something they teach them to do.

no robot here - just a hustler working on product hunt and, yes, manually reaching out to founders to let them know that they just got free press.

Many of them respond with a "Thanks". Not one person has said "Spam".

Erik, you even posted this spam almost verbatim on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032837

I hope you're not going to continue to do that. I get you're hustling, but this isn't the right way to do this.

> Not one person has said "Spam".

I marked the tweet as spam via the report the tweet feature, I don't know if people usually actually reply as "this is spam."

Sounds like a missed opportunity for a bot then... It is not like you are really personalizing the message at all. The only human part of this would be deciding which photo to use to entice the developer. (Could this be optimized by a bot and A/B testing?)

I agree with the other comments that this is a useful feature, but would be more well suited for a customized twitter account with a name explaining it better.

the idea of a bot is intriguing, but right now I'm manually finding founders contact info, reaching out, getting them in the system, asking them Q+A's on producthunt.com, cc'ing other relevant players in the convo, and following up with them to see how PH influenced their traffic and how we can help (which, again, founders respond gratefully for all the free traffic)

If anyone has suggestions for ways to automate part of this, as it takes a long time, i'm open!

Ever try emailing founders instead? I wonder if you'd get a better and/or faster response.

Perhaps you could require your product submitters to insert the contact email for the products they are submitting. Then, you could auto email the founder as soon as their product is posted on Product Hunt.

it's a good idea - but we want to make it super easy for the product submitter to post.

for some reason, we find that people are more responsive on twitter.

I don't see what the big deal is. Some HN people like to complain a lot - don't let it get to you.

The majority of the tweets you're referring to are notifications to founders when their product is on Product Hunt so they can answer questions that arise. This leads to (1) a more interesting conversation and (2) fewer bummed founders. We started doing this more actively after receiving emails and tweets from disappointed founders that didn't know their product was featured until days later.

Also, we're not using an automated script to send these tweets.

You might as well automate this. I believe it would not be a great undertaking. Also if your only concern was notifying the creator/owner, why would you not DM them on twitter? Or better yet, e-mail them with a bot that scrapes emails off the product site as an example?

Clearly, you guys are also trying to benefit from the increased publicity from using a public message "board" platform instead of a more private form of communication. I believe that may be the origin of some of these concerns. You guys aren't addressing the fact that you are doing this on a public platform to promote your site. Instead, you are still trying to argue that you are doing this completely independent of the traffic benefits....

"why would you not DM them on twitter"

Most people's twitter settings require that they follow you to DM them.

"e-mail them with a bot that scrapes emails off the product site"

Not a bad idea and we could make some educated guesses as to what the email address is (e.g. support@company.com). That said, we've found some founders aren't as quick to respond to email as they are on Twitter. I personally prefer the more ephemeral nature of Twitter for these type of notifications as my email inbox is already difficult enough to manage.

"Clearly, you guys are also trying to benefit from the increased publicity from using a public message 'board' platform"

We send direct @mentions to founders/startups on Twitter. These tweets will not surface in other's Twitter feed unless they're following both people.

How else are they supposed to contact the product people? Twitter is probably the easiest way to do it.

Do you want to amend or respond to this comment in light of rrhoover's reply to you?

Considering that if you look closely at the screenshots and see that it is Erik himself commenting on products, so as to have a reason to notify users, no, not really.

http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instant-chemistry

http://www.producthunt.com/posts/jumpido

http://www.producthunt.com/posts/customeed

Maybe if they made it something you could subscribe to, opt-in, I would think it wasn't spam, but as it stands now, getting a notification on all of my Twitter enabled devices about something I don't care about, that I didn't ask for nor subscribe to, is spam. That some are advocating actually "scraping emails" to automate email notifications because this is so useful just leaves me a little bit dumbfounded.

Is getting an email, albeit unsolicited, about a community having a discussion about your generally new product[0] actually unwanted email for the majority of start-up founders? Especially to an email that is specifically mentioned on the site as a suggestions/feedback email. Both Erik and Ryan have said that many founders were happy with the notification.

It seems to me that companies might even actually pay for a service like this and if enough people thought it added value, I don't see where the issue with scraping emails is. Perhaps you could enlighten me or provide a different viewpoint as this would be something that I'd have no issue implementing myself and the fact that it scares you so much has me worried that I would be overreaching if I ever did. I just don't see why an email scraper is seen as inherently evil?

[0] I imagine a system where there has to be a minimum amount of comments and not one in which the only comment is made by Erik (or a bot) and used as the "motivation" for responding to the thread as a founder.

It's still a conversation even if he started it.

I find it totally bizarre that you would claim "you don't care about" this. As in, I do care about it.

Am I saying it's okay for someone to start talking about my product, then spam me to let me know this is happening?

Yes.

Why wouldn't you care about it? If you are running a business, and the internet is talking about it (on a pretty popular site with lots of traffic), it seems that should be reasonably high on your list of things to care about. Would you want to know that you are on the front page of Hacker News?