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Ethical Cold Outreach

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Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#41

Post by kerkeslager »

dewey wrote: post #6
jaggederest wrote: post #4

Interestingly, I wish there were the opposite of a do-not-email list for this kind of thing. I think it might actually be somewhat fun to get actually relevant email from companies working on interesting products in an extremely targeted way. Then companies could just go and grab a lead list from there, with some metadata, and if too many people report it as spam (you could use a private relay on the site, for exampl…

You are basically just describing targeted advertising and it's already working like that, just not by email and probably more accurately than people putting themselves into buckets.

The arrogance of thinking targeted advertising knows more accurately what email I want to receive than I do is staggering.

No, buddy, I do actually know what email I want to receive.

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#42

Post by dgellow »

ElProlactin wrote: post #32
dgellow wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s regularly enforced… are your local laws pointless because other countries aren’t concerned? Is free speech in the US pointless because North Korea or China doesn’t respect it?

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#43

Post by kerkeslager »

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?

Yes! Finally you get it!

Not once in my entire 40 years on this planet has a single ad or cold outreach been welcome. Every single one is full of lies and partial information that is vastly inferior to me going out and researching products that I want.

I don't care what you think I'll be interested in. I might be, but you're too biased for me to trust you to give me reliable information about the product. Leave me alone.

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#44

Post by Barbing »

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'm very likely going to cost their privacy/compliance team…time

What might this look like for you?

(I don’t cold email except thanks or say questions btw, but I am curious!)

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#45

Post by bko »

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.

Cold outreach is the only way I found to actually find users early on. No amount of blogs or social media stuff will get you users.

I had a product that got thousands of views from a Reddit post. Out of those, literally 0 clicked anywhere besides the page they landed on. I've been #2 on Product Hunt, 0 have actually used the product after clicking into it the first time.

Most products have a very tiny customer base, and they're not just casually browsing social media looking to find your exact product. You need to find these people and reach out to them directly.

Don't lie, but do little things that show them that you respect their time. Keep it short, tell them what the product is in plain English. Do some amount of research to qualify them as a potential customer. Try to tailor it to be relevant to them. Put your real name behind it. Ask them for feedback even if they wouldn't pay for your product. And don't follow up more than once or maybe twice.

It sucks. No one likes doing it. But if something is actually relevant for me, I would at least be curious enough to take a meeting. Unfortunately the only cold emails I get is from dev pod-shops or venture debt type people which are uninteresting.

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#46

Post by ElProlactin »

dgellow wrote: post #42
ElProlactin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s regularly enforced… are your local laws pointless because other countries aren’t concerned? Is free speech in the US pointless because North Korea or China doesn’t respect it?

Regularly enforced against who?

Let's say some company or "entrepreneur" sitting in an office in Palo Alto or in his house in the Philippines wants to sell a SaaS app they vibe coded in a week.

They use AI to create a marketing email and list of targets. They blast it out and it lands in the inbox of some dude in Germany.

Do you really think the company or individual is going to ever face any consequences for sending the guy an email?

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#47

Post by Gualdrapo »

kimjune01 wrote: post #18

if the recipient can't tell, does it matter?

You'd be trying to sell something to someone by deceiving them into thinking they are interacting with a real human - if your customer ever finds out, any trust they had on you will be lost and any reputation you might have could go directly to the trash bin.

I imagine for some people it can be kind of hard to tell in this case, but even for someone not in the known for the power of AI made stuff like me there are red flags. The blur of the background where "Chase" is doesn't seem to match a "natural" aperture taken from a camera and even the perspective seems odd. Granted, you could say it can be just a generated background from zoom or something, but there are no visible artifacts when he moves, whereas you can see them on any zoom call when someone applies that effect. Also the timing in his speech can change dramatically all of a sudden for no reason whatsoever.

I'm really dumb about marketing stuff, as with most things, so I can't think of any reason you'd prefer to pull out all of this stuff instead of doing something like the article suggested - being honest and stating that the message you are getting is generated by a bot or something.

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#48

Post by dewey »

kerkeslager wrote: post #41
dewey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are basically just describing targeted advertising and it's already working like that, just not by email and probably more accurately than people putting themselves into buckets.

The arrogance of thinking targeted advertising knows more accurately what email I want to receive than I do is staggering. No, buddy, I do actually know what email I want to receive.

I guess you didn't really read what I wrote, buddy.

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#49

Post by georgel »

bko wrote: post #45
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.

Cold outreach is the only way I found to actually find users early on. No amount of blogs or social media stuff will get you users. I had a product that got thousands of views from a Reddit post. Out of those, literally 0 clicked anywhere besides the page they landed on. I've been #2 on Product Hunt, 0 have actually used the product after clicking into it the first time. Most products have a very tiny customer base,…

Right there with you. All the products I have built are not interesting to the HN or ProductHunt crowd. I don't even bother in those channels. Anyone reading this, find the places that are actually relevant to your customers.

I get a lot of office cleaning / janitorial spam (I don't have an office) alongside the dev shop spam. Just checked my junk SMS folder, I had 5 SMS messages for "fundraising" for a company gone 10 years ago. It is non-stop.

Re: Ethical Cold Outreach

#50

Post by vismit2000 »

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.

Cold outreach was recently discussed on HN some days ago with this comment even highlighted! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104838
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