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How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

campfirelabs.co

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Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#191

Post by devdas »

growt wrote: post #186
smohare wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam generally includes unsolicited and unwanted emails, targeted or not.

Sure, but it also generally means large quantities of those (regarding email I don't think 30k qualifies as large quantities). My personal definition would be that the messages were sent without any thought if the audience might be interested in the content and that does not appear to be the case here. If your personal definition is that every email you receive ,that you did not ask for in some way yourself, is spam…

It's unsolicited bulk email, and bulk is generally > 10 or so for most people, > 1 if you are strict.

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#192

Post by devdas »

pmarreck wrote: post #180
haihaibye wrote: post #169

500 emails for 20 signups = 96% off target. >> By May of 2015 I had sent over 30,000 sales and marketing emails .96 × 30,000 = You just annoyed ~28,800 people. It's only because this immense amount of time lost is borne by strangers that it's a viable business. Let's not glorify spammers.

What is the line between marketing and spamming?

Consent.

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#193

Post by akavel »

willart4food wrote: post #189

Nice. (commenting so that I can remember this post)

There's a "favorite" link you should click instead, located just below the article's title on this very page — it'll add the article to your "favorites" list at: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=willart4food

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#194

Post by growt »

devdas wrote: post #191
growt wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it also generally means large quantities of those (regarding email I don't think 30k qualifies as large quantities). My personal definition would be that the messages were sent without any thought if the audience might be interested in the content and that does not appear to be the case here. If your personal definition is that every email you receive ,that you did not ask for in some way yourself, is spam…

It's unsolicited bulk email, and bulk is generally > 10 or so for most people, > 1 if you are strict.

I'm just trying to differentiate between this guy who is sending 30k emails to people that might likely be interested in his business and some viagra seller that sends ten million emails a day to any address he can get his hands on.

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#195

Post by growt »

criddell wrote: post #182
growt wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 4% signup rate actually signifies really well targeted emails. Not everyone who doesn't sign up is annoyed by the mail (or did even open or read it). I think this is far from beeing spam, where you would see signup rates well below 1%.

> A 4% signup rate actually signifies really well targeted emails. You're spamming 25 people to get one sign up? That sounds terrible.

Well if you send an email to 25 people and 1 one of them actually takes time to read it, click and fill out a signup form, chances are pretty high that more of the other 24 somewhat liked it. Most likely 20 of them didn't even bother to open the email.

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#196

Post by [deleted] »

criddell wrote: post #182
growt wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 4% signup rate actually signifies really well targeted emails. Not everyone who doesn't sign up is annoyed by the mail (or did even open or read it). I think this is far from beeing spam, where you would see signup rates well below 1%.

> A 4% signup rate actually signifies really well targeted emails. You're spamming 25 people to get one sign up? That sounds terrible.

[deleted]

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#197

Post by burtonator »

sah2ed wrote: post #132
burtonator wrote: post #34

I actually did this too... I create Datastreamer ( http://www.datastreamer.io/ ) which (when I created it) was an RSS syndication platform as a service. You gave us RSS feeds and then we would index them and send you the output without having to deal with the insanity of RSS feeds. This was a decade ago though. I've been running it since and now it's more of a massive search engine of content - nearly a petabyte at t…

> Datastreamer was the first company in the content indexing space and we were WAY ahead of everyone else. Meltwater.com is in the same space but is much older — it was founded in 2001. Their engineering team recently blogged [0] about their petabyte-size Elasticsearch cluster which still uses a much older version of ES (1.7.x). 0: Optimal Shard Placement in a Petabyte Scale Elasticsearch Cluster https://news.ycombin…

Actually, Meltwater was one of our first customers.

We powered their blog data back in the day. They acquired a smaller company in the space and incorporated their stack and used us for about 5 years.

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#198

Post by devdas »

growt wrote: post #194
devdas wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unsolicited bulk email, and bulk is generally > 10 or so for most people, > 1 if you are strict.

I'm just trying to differentiate between this guy who is sending 30k emails to people that might likely be interested in his business and some viagra seller that sends ten million emails a day to any address he can get his hands on.

That's a question of scale. A drop of sewage in a barrel of wine or a cup of sewage in a barrel of wine have the same effect.

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#199

Post by mbrock »

notahacker wrote: post #181
mbrock wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not the only possible ethical judgment. You’re assuming a kind of utilitarian perspective, but I think most people have at least an implicit virtue ethical perspective, which might come into play when evaluating the morality of a person who lives a life of leisure and freedom funded by maximizing the arbitrage from a third world labor force employed for repetitive and alienated tasks. Especially when the thesi…

I think the developing world considers bosses that provide them with comfortable middle class incomes by local standards doing work which is far more attractive than alternative employment opportunities to be a tad more virtuous than the equally wealthy Westerners clamouring for the elimination of their jobs though... Nothing could really be more damaging to the development of poorer countries than condemning them to…

I sounded more judging than I really am. The contrast between virtue as perceived by one’s peers and global utility is a fascinating problem. Few people appreciate the virtue of someone like Norman Borlaug, but if you personally abstain from eating meat you can score pretty highly.

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#200

Post by bionsystem »

adrianN wrote: post #142
zorga wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you envision other means of distributing the planet's vast resources Whether you pay for yourself, or others pay for you, is a binary choice. There are no other options that don't fall into those two categories. > is predicated on the belief that the current structure is the result of some static law of nature Nope, just on the nature of boolean logic.

The universe is rarely best described by boolean logic. There are other options that are currently not feasible, but not forbidden by any laws of nature. For example robots could provide everybody's needs. Or we could genetically engineer people so that everybody finds their particular job meaningful and fulfilling.

Someone didn't read Aldous Huxley to the end.
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