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Ethical Cold Outreach
- singpolyma3 1mo agoI 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.
- rsyring 1mo agoWord.
- ElProlactin 1mo 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?
- dgellow 1mo agoThat’s the case in germany. Unless you give your explicit consent of course
- ElProlactin 1mo agoI'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 1mo agoPeople do breach laws, yes. I don’t understand your point
- ElProlactin 1mo agoThe 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 1mo agoIt’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 1mo agoRegularly 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?
- dgellow 1mo agoIf they ever want to have a presence in Germany, yes
- ElProlactin 1mo agoWhy would they ever want to have a presence in Germany when they can sell digital products and services to anyone, anywhere, Germany included, from wherever they're located? The bottom line is that in the real world, some random "entrepreneur" or SME sending an unsolicited "Hey software guy, I have a service you might be interested in" email to somebody in Germany isn't ever going to cause them trouble.
- dgellow 1mo ago
- gyanchawdhary 1mo agoCorrect. They are quite a sensitive demographic when it comes to human contact.
- gyanchawdhary 1mo agoExactly. 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 ?
- Macha 1mo agoMy 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.
- marssaxman 1mo agoThat is exactly my position.
- cpncrunch 1mo agoNot 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.
- anticorporate 1mo 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 1mo agoWell 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 1mo agoNo, 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.
- gyanchawdhary 1mo agoHis bio checks out.
- singpolyma3 1mo agoCorrect. Unless a close personal friend
- antonvs 1mo agoThat’s the position the EU is currently taking with telemarketers. What’s the issue?
- kerkeslager 1mo agoYes! 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.
- gigatree 1mo agoThat’s fine for you but if you’re extrapolating that to everyone then… well you’re wrong. Otherwise people wouldn’t still be doing it. Otherwise you’re just stating your preferences to internet strangers who have no idea who you are. What else don’t you like, pineapple on pizza?
- card_zero 1mo agoIf you're saying "every single one is full of lies and partial information" is false because people are successful with it, that doesn't follow.
- account42 1mo agoPeople are generally against others stealing from them but yet there are still people who steal.
- kerkeslager 28d agoClassic advertiser nonsense. Sure, let's entertain the possibility that you're one of the not-very-intelligent people who thinks ads are there to help them, and you like having ads shown to you. That's great for you, have at it! If you want to spend your money on shit you don't need from companies that spend their money on advertising instead of producing quality products, that's your prerogative. That doesn't mean it's okay to ram ads into the face of everyone else who doesn't want ads. And outside of the self-serving Hacker News bubble where you wrongly assume anything profitable must also be popular, most people don't like ads. To borrow your analogy--sure, me not liking pineapple on pizza is just a preference. But advertising is like if they offer free pizza on the condition that it has pineapple on it, and if I pick the pineapple off they have someone follow me around and try to put the pineapple back on the pizza as I put it in my mouth, and when I decide I'm going to pay for pizza to avoid the pineapple guy, they still put pineapple on the pizza, and people follow me around trying to put pineapple on the pizza that's in my lunchbox and sneak into my house and put pineapple on the pizza in my fridge. And at some point you have to admit that while not liking pineapple on pizza is just my preference, maybe my preference is valid and you pineapple on pizza people need to leave me the fuck alone. For the record, I like pineapple on pizza.
- heikkilevanto 1mo agoThat is the law here in EU. Unsolicited commercial email is forbidden. Even if I have done business with you in the past, you are not allowed to contact me about something else. Unless I have explicitly and freely given my consent, and you can document that. That is a good law, and keeps the amount of spam somewhat down.
- dbbk 1mo agoThat isn't true for B2B
- kimjune01 1mo agowould you prefer that they advertised? Or is your life good enough to not need to learn about new offers?
- nemomarx 1mo agoHow 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 1mo agoCongratulations, you just confirmed the need for SEO in all its forms.
- gigatree 1mo agoLmao “if I need it I’ll just Google it and give my business to whoever paid the most to show up on the first page, thankfully those people don’t also spend tons on advertising too”
- rcxdude 1mo agoThat's more than a little bit of a strawman. I would expect most people would shop around and do some research (now, comparison and review websites are also now a cesspool of spam and misshapen incentives, but at least that's only annoying while I'm researching what to buy. If companies only spent their advertising budget on SEO and buying reviews I would be fair bit happier)
- account42 1mo agoJust because you can think out of alternative abuse that sleazy actors can resort to doesn't mean that we should accept the abuse under discussion.
- rcxdude 1mo agoNot all SEO is deceitful. Yes, it is useful for me for the website for your product to appear in relevant searches.
- hackernud3s 1mo agoIt'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.
- kimjune01 1mo agoif the recipient can't tell, does it matter?
- MeetingsBrowser 1mo agoIf I lie to you but you can’t tell, is that ok?
- FinnKuhn 1mo agoThey didn't say it was okay, but asked, if it mattered. As long as I don't find out probably not. If I do however...
- Gualdrapo 1mo agoYou'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.
- jaggederest 1mo agoInterestingly, 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
- dewey 1mo agoYou 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 1mo agoThe 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 1mo agoI guess you didn't really read what I wrote, buddy.
- kerkeslager 28d agoI did read it, and I guess if you intended anything other than what you wrote you should've written what you intended, buddy.
- svachalek 1mo agoUnfortunately 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.
- xgulfie 1mo agoThis is true for "AI content" in general. People feel betrayed when they find out, and publishers try to hide it best they can.
- ElProlactin 1mo 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.
- sarreph 1mo agoOne 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.
- andai 1mo 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 1mo agoah, the good old days where everything you needed to know was all signal no noise
- georgel 1mo agoThe 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.
- anticorporate 1mo 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 1mo agoI 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 1mo 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!)
- rcxdude 1mo agoProbably some GDPR requests to remove their email and other personal information from their databases.
- inigyou 1mo ago
- mikert89 1mo agoI'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
- gigatree 1mo agoSilver lining of the digital ecological collapse: we’re forced to find worth and connection irl
- SMAAART 1mo agoCold outreach is spam. Period.
- geraldsterling 1mo ago[flagged]