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.
bko 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
anticorporate 47 minutes ago [-]
> 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 get considered by my organization, and I'm very likely going to cost their privacy/compliance team more time than they spent contacting me unwantedly in the first place.
georgel 40 minutes ago [-]
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?".
Barbing 28 minutes ago [-]
> 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!)
antonvs 36 minutes ago [-]
> If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.
Yup. That’s why rape and murder is so popular.
ElProlactin 1 hours ago [-]
> Nobody wants to hear from your AI bot, least of all when it’s pretending to be you, laying it on thick.
The people who are doing this don't care about you though. They're playing a numbers game and if this form of "communication" proves to be more than a flash-in-the-pan, it would be an indication that the return realized exceeds the cost by a meaningful enough margin.
It's the same thing with most of the popular scams today. Many people look at them and wonder, "How did anyone fall for that?", but they still exist because they work on enough of the people to make them viable.
jaggederest 2 hours ago [-]
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 example, like mailinator) you lose access. Good citizens stay. And charge a nominal fee to enforce the reputation system.
I'm sure this is one of those "congratulations you have reinvented system Z" problems
svachalek 48 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately I don't think it's possible for companies not to abuse your information, unless it's like 1-2 people and they're independently wealthy and the business is really more like a personal hobby.
I don't know how many times I've been to something like a niche clothing retailer and they ask me to join their mailing list for a discount and I think hey why not, I should come back in 6 months or a year and see what's new, maybe they'll let me know about their Labor Day sale. And of course they immediately proceed to email me 5 times a DAY because maybe I'm ready to shop now, when I wasn't at 2:00 pm. Unsubscribing only solves 20% of the problem because of course they subscribed me to 5 different daily lists and you need to unsubscribe separately. And, of course, if you don't do it quickly enough it will be 6, 7, 8, 10, 20 lists.
They're not human. They really can't help it.
transitorykris 48 minutes ago [-]
System Z is vaguely the read reply cards you would find in magazines. While I enjoyed the snail mail spammed materials, my parents were terrorized through the entire 90s by my abuse of those found in professional magazines like Computer Language.
dewey 1 hours ago [-]
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.
kerkeslager 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
dewey 3 minutes ago [-]
I guess you didn't really read what I wrote, buddy.
mikert89 41 minutes ago [-]
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
singpolyma3 2 hours ago [-]
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.
hackernud3s 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
ElProlactin 2 hours ago [-]
> 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?
anticorporate 54 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
ElProlactin 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
anticorporate 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
singpolyma3 43 minutes ago [-]
Correct. Unless a close personal friend
cpncrunch 1 hours ago [-]
Not if it's bulk, but fine if it is actually a direct outreach with a hand-crafted email. The latter is appreciated, and the former is hated. It's usually easy to spot the difference, and a quick look at the headers will usually confirm whether it's from a bulk mailing service.
marssaxman 1 hours ago [-]
That is exactly my position.
Macha 1 hours ago [-]
My friends are. But then it's not cold.
The problem is way more people are convinced (or just hoping, or just setting off an automated system that is even less discriminating than that) that I am interested in their product than I have inclination to check their pitch out, especially given their to-date 0% success rate.
dgellow 1 hours ago [-]
That’s the case in germany. Unless you give your explicit consent of course
ElProlactin 1 hours ago [-]
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.
dgellow 46 minutes ago [-]
People do breach laws, yes. I don’t understand your point
ElProlactin 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
dgellow 32 minutes ago [-]
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?
ElProlactin 26 minutes ago [-]
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?
gyanchawdhary 1 hours ago [-]
Correct. They are quite a sensitive demographic when it comes to human contact.
antonvs 35 minutes ago [-]
That’s the position the EU is currently taking with telemarketers. What’s the issue?
kerkeslager 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
gyanchawdhary 1 hours ago [-]
Exactly. How dare anyone contact him without first submitting a formal application for permission to exist in his inbox. Wait .. how dare I assume their gender .. wait, am I even allowed to comment ?
rsyring 2 hours ago [-]
Word.
kimjune01 1 hours ago [-]
would you prefer that they advertised? Or is your life good enough to not need to learn about new offers?
shermantanktop 39 minutes ago [-]
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."
nemomarx 1 hours ago [-]
How about if I'm interested in going out and getting something I look it up on my own time? Just don't tell me about it.
warkdarrior 45 minutes ago [-]
Congratulations, you just confirmed the need for SEO in all its forms.
singpolyma3 41 minutes ago [-]
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
sarreph 1 hours ago [-]
One of my favourite things to do with AI video pitch creator products is to put a paragraph of text into the first_name / company_name form fields on their "request a demo" function, to see how ridiculously fast their AI bot will read it out.
kimjune01 1 hours ago [-]
if the recipient can't tell, does it matter?
Gualdrapo 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
MeetingsBrowser 1 hours ago [-]
If I lie to you but you can’t tell, is that ok?
andai 1 hours ago [-]
>[Slop is] a tax on our daily allotment of mental energy. As Jane Friedman writes, we need relief from this constant epistemic vigilance.
Yeah, I can't wait to go back to being able to trust everything I read.
kimjune01 1 hours ago [-]
ah, the good old days where everything you needed to know was all signal no noise
xgulfie 1 hours ago [-]
This is true for "AI content" in general. People feel betrayed when they find out, and publishers try to hide it best they can.
Rendered at 01:19:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
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 get considered by my organization, and I'm very likely going to cost their privacy/compliance team more time than they spent contacting me unwantedly in the first place.
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?".
What might this look like for you?
(I don’t cold email except thanks or say questions btw, but I am curious!)
Yup. That’s why rape and murder is so popular.
The people who are doing this don't care about you though. They're playing a numbers game and if this form of "communication" proves to be more than a flash-in-the-pan, it would be an indication that the return realized exceeds the cost by a meaningful enough margin.
It's the same thing with most of the popular scams today. Many people look at them and wonder, "How did anyone fall for that?", but they still exist because they work on enough of the people to make them viable.
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 example, like mailinator) you lose access. Good citizens stay. And charge a nominal fee to enforce the reputation system.
I'm sure this is one of those "congratulations you have reinvented system Z" problems
I don't know how many times I've been to something like a niche clothing retailer and they ask me to join their mailing list for a discount and I think hey why not, I should come back in 6 months or a year and see what's new, maybe they'll let me know about their Labor Day sale. And of course they immediately proceed to email me 5 times a DAY because maybe I'm ready to shop now, when I wasn't at 2:00 pm. Unsubscribing only solves 20% of the problem because of course they subscribed me to 5 different daily lists and you need to unsubscribe separately. And, of course, if you don't do it quickly enough it will be 6, 7, 8, 10, 20 lists.
They're not human. They really can't help it.
No, buddy, I do actually know what email I want to receive.
But I get a log of "we noticed your website isn't ranking in Google" spam which is not.
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.
The best you will ever be able to do is (try to) ignore unwanted communication.
The more common scenario is that I waste more of their time than my own.
The problem is way more people are convinced (or just hoping, or just setting off an automated system that is even less discriminating than that) that I am interested in their product than I have inclination to check their pitch out, especially given their to-date 0% success rate.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
Yeah, I can't wait to go back to being able to trust everything I read.