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Ethical Cold Outreach

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Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#31

Post by ElProlactin »

anticorporate wrote: post #24
ElProlactin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's still not cool. Don't do it. So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?

> So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in? If I don't know them, no, they may not.

Well unless you disconnect from the internet, sign off of every social platform, run your email off a whitelist, there's no way for you to actually enforce this.

The best you will ever be able to do is (try to) ignore unwanted communication.

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#32

Post by ElProlactin »

dgellow wrote: post #28
ElProlactin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not German but I'd venture a guess that people still receive unsolicited outreach in Germany. The internet is global. A person sitting in Palo Alto, a shack in a rural village in Southeast Asia, etc. doesn't care about German law and is, in all but a few exceptional cases, beyond its reach in the real world.

People do breach laws, yes. I don’t understand your point

The point is that Germany saying "you can't contact someone by email unless they want you to" is practically unenforceable in the real world. So it's pointless.

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#33

Post by mikert89 »

I'll say this, people are seriously underestimating how sophisticated ai outbound sales has gotten. There are certainly startups where 1/3 of the engineers are focused on "go to market engineering", which is a mix of ai messaging and data engineering to automate sales. Its becoming more important than the product in some verticals, people are hand building their own systems

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#34

Post by singpolyma3 »

kimjune01 wrote: post #16
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I sort of agree. But honesty if you're cold emailing me I don't super care if your a real human or not. It's still not cool. Don't do it.

would you prefer that they advertised? Or is your life good enough to not need to learn about new offers?

Cold email is a form of advertising, but if your question is do I consider any form of advertising acceptable: sure I do. I don't mind display ads or video ads where there is a quid pro quo etc. But cold outreach (email, calls, door to door etc) is unethical

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#35

Post by georgel »

anticorporate wrote: post #27
georgel wrote: post #23

The comments on cold outreach on HN are always going to be negative. I assume the majority of us here are developers and go to insane lengths to block "spammers". That said, even YC (can't find the exact Dalton + Michael episode) encourages cold outreach. If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.

> If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it. The same can be said for all sorts of activities, from the illegal and unethical to the mundane. Although, to be fair, you're right. Which is why I actively make it my goal to make doing cold sales outreach more costly to the companies doing it than if they had done nothing at all. A BDR cold emailing me is a pretty good way to make sure your software does not g…

I wish BDR's and AE's could just answer the important questions I have for them in the first call. I have wasted countless hours of my life sitting in sales meetings, when my wallet is already open.

It really shouldn't be that hard, I even would do the work of "hey this is our expected usage, I have already adjusted for an overage buffer, how much?".

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#36

Post by shermantanktop »

kimjune01 wrote: post #16
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I sort of agree. But honesty if you're cold emailing me I don't super care if your a real human or not. It's still not cool. Don't do it.

would you prefer that they advertised? Or is your life good enough to not need to learn about new offers?

Advertisers always say they are educating and informing, so that their "audience" is "learning" about their product.

And there's a bit of truth to that, for new products - people don't know about it yet. But it quickly goes from awareness to persuasion, then lies, and finally mindless repetition of a logo and tagline.

The endgame of ads is not information flow, it is programming the emotions and memory of the "audience."

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#37

Post by hackernud3s »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I sort of agree. But honesty if you're cold emailing me I don't super care if your a real human or not. It's still not cool. Don't do it.

It's ok if it's super-targeted. If it's a product for high school girls soccer coaches, and I'm a high school girls soccer coach, that's reasonable outreach.

But I get a log of "we noticed your website isn't ranking in Google" spam which is not.

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#38

Post by anticorporate »

ElProlactin wrote: post #31
anticorporate wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in? If I don't know them, no, they may not.

Well unless you disconnect from the internet, sign off of every social platform, run your email off a whitelist, there's no way for you to actually enforce this. The best you will ever be able to do is (try to) ignore unwanted communication.

No, the best I will ever be able to do is get someone fined or fired for their actions.

The more common scenario is that I waste more of their time than my own.

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#39

Post by antonvs »

georgel wrote: post #23

The comments on cold outreach on HN are always going to be negative. I assume the majority of us here are developers and go to insane lengths to block "spammers". That said, even YC (can't find the exact Dalton + Michael episode) encourages cold outreach. If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.

> If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.

Yup. That’s why rape and murder is so popular.

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#40

Post by antonvs »

ElProlactin wrote: post #5
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I sort of agree. But honesty if you're cold emailing me I don't super care if your a real human or not. It's still not cool. Don't do it.

> It's still not cool. Don't do it. So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?

That’s the position the EU is currently taking with telemarketers. What’s the issue?
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