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Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

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11–20 of 71 posts

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#11
Lots of comments here saying "it's just marketing". I agree to some extent, but Datadog is easily the worst offender I've ever seen.

I work on a small engineering team and more than half the team got calls to their personal numbers and emails from Datadog. They are relentless. It's a huge turn-off, and I hope companies like this get named-and-shamed more often.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#12
This does not look like marketing as such, it is usually generated as part of sales (cold) outreach, Sales/Business Development representatives send this type of thing to customers when they are prospecting.

Marketing is different strategy. SDRs/BDRs are looking at very specific accounts and targeting specific people vs marketing which is typically not specific.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#14
This is why there is an unsubscribe link for unsolicited spam/ad email as legally required. Just use it. Unsolicited email isn't illegal so you just have to deal with it. I wish I was -only- getting spam from datadog that I could opt out of instead of unceasing spam from places that the unsubscribe link is just a confirmation that your email address is real.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#15
B2B SaaS marketing is one of those things where its absolutely awful, and yet works well enough. So in light of the recent downturn managers are just cracking the whip and telling their marketing/development/sales/enablement people and tools to spam-harder. Taking an already bad experience and dialing up the volume.

As a buyer in the past I vehemently hated it. As a sales engineer now I fully realize i'm part of the problem, but have no solutions/alternatives to offer. Product led growth is my preferred approach but never have I ever seen a company not doing that switch to doing that.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#16
I get a lot of Datadog spam, but was amusingly unable to actually convert a trial account into a paying account. I emailed multiple addresses multiple times, including the support email, the trial onboarding contact and the addresses that were spamming me, and nobody ever replied.

Found an alternative and haven't looked at them since.

EDIT: I had a similar but different experience with Google, where their sales were trying to convince me to switch to them from AWS. On the third call they arranged when we were going to talk about moving some ML workloads over, they just didn't show up and the 3 Googlers they invited to the meeting never contacted us again.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#17

I get a lot of Datadog spam, but was amusingly unable to actually convert a trial account into a paying account. I emailed multiple addresses multiple times, including the support email, the trial onboarding contact and the addresses that were spamming me, and nobody ever replied. Found an alternative and haven't looked at them since. EDIT: I had a similar but different experience with Google, where their sales were…

What alternative did you find? Their product has always seemed nice in demos, but the aggressive marketing has made it hard for me to look at getting more involved.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#18
I got a cold call from them at my previous job, which was enough to make me write off using it, as a tech lead and senior in the org who could have gotten us all onboard. Especially since our tool at the time was failing us.

That said, at my new job they actually are using it and it IS a fantastic product. So... maybe cool it on the sales and marketing as that was actively counterproductive with me, when the product speaks for itself.

edit: I should add, I do put my phone number out there, the call was during business hours, and they didn't call any further after I said I wasn't interested, so looking at it objectively now it wasn't the worst experience.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#19
Do Datadog really see returns on this? They are absolutely head and shoulders worse than the rest of the industry when it comes to aggressive "business development" / cold calling behavior.

My experience with Datadog has been that the product is pretty good (unbelievably expensive, like all monitoring solutions, but good), but the business development / marketing culture is a huge drawback to the deal.

At a previous employer, we actually had to get a special exemption from our engineering president when we felt Datadog was a good choice for our organization's needs. He was so upset with Datadog's incessant marketing that he would regularly make "you can buy whatever you want as long as it's not Datadog" jokes on calls.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#20
post #19

Do Datadog really see returns on this? They are absolutely head and shoulders worse than the rest of the industry when it comes to aggressive "business development" / cold calling behavior. My experience with Datadog has been that the product is pretty good (unbelievably expensive, like all monitoring solutions, but good), but the business development / marketing culture is a huge drawback to the deal. At a previous…

Not all monitoring solutions are unbelievably expensive. For example, netdata is excellent and is free.
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