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.
> 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.
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?".
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 ?
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."
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
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.
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.
What might this look like for you?
(I don’t cold email except thanks or say questions btw, but I am curious!)
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?".
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."
Yeah, I can't wait to go back to being able to trust everything I read.