Ask HN: Startup, how to get companies to take you seriously?

I have this same problem. Sometimes I send many emails out to a sales team, asking for details for how to get their service and simply get no response.

We don't even get to the point where they know I represent a relatively small company.

Starting a startup is starting a company. Starting a company is a business thing, not an engineering thing. Think of it as being able to sell a product, before you even have a product to sell. You cannot really operate 'as a company' without having an actual licensed company. You may need to do a bit more leg work before you start this venture in earnest.

Then reach out to the enterprise. You have to know exactly who to route your request to in the company; you can't just talk to "sales" or "customer support" as those people have no idea how to talk to their own engineering groups. You'll need to know the language that the particular group in an enterprise speaks, so they will actually consider your message, prioritize it, and do some work on it. Cold-calling generally doesn't work unless you are very good at sales. You will probably need to engage with someone at the enterprise on a different pretext, and slowly shift the focus over to the thing you actually want, and hope whoever you're talking to will do some leg work for you to get you to the right group.

Try to position your request as an offer to do something for them. I am building a product that delivers your product more customers, I am building a product that supports all of your competitors and figured you might want to be supported too, I want my development team to work with your API and give you feedback about how well it works for us and report bugs to you. But don't make it sound like a sales call. Make it sound like somebody in the company already expects this and you're just trying to coordinate with them on something they already want to do.

But if they actually don't want a lot of use cases right now, you may have to position it as a test case that isn't being released to new customers, so they don't have to worry about building out their production support infrastructure and being on the hook for it going down. SLAs and EULAs are also a concern. Then of course there's data privacy, regulations, etc to consider. In many cases you may need to establish a legal contract in order for both parties to be covered.

There should be some kind of reporting system where you can get entire domains / organisations blacklisted from ever sending emails to any recipient, I think a harsh stance like that is the only thing that will keep our inboxes clean

An alternative is to consider that the design of email (everything* going into your inbox by default) is broken, and consider that simply knowing someone’s email address shouldn’t grant access to any attention. I’m a big fan of HEY for exactly this reason. Go ahead and send me as many sales emails as you like - they’ll never notify me until I explicitly grant the sender permission.

Besides incremental UX improvements over time, the email experience is not well aligned with the way things actually work. The assumption that people are good actors is a poor one and almost everyone who uses email is stuck with an unmaintainable backlog of crap as a result. Instead of further incremental improvements to the same mess, switch things up.

I don't think I can edit my post but I should have mentioned in the OP I'm not looking for a custom deal or anything, I am actually just trying to sign up for the services/APIs these companies provide.