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- Hacker News
- if the recipient can't tell, does it matter?by kimjune01
- If I lie to you but you can’t tell, is that ok?
- 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.
by Gualdrapo - Cold outreach is spam. Period.by SMAAART
- >[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.
by andai - ah, the good old days where everything you needed to know was all signal no noiseby kimjune01
- Silver lining of the digital ecological collapse: we’re forced to find worth and connection irlby gigatree
- This is true for "AI content" in general. People feel betrayed when they find out, and publishers try to hide it best they can.by xgulfie
- 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 systemsby mikert89
- 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.by sarreph
- 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.by singpolyma3
- would you prefer that they advertised? Or is your life good enough to not need to learn about new offers?by kimjune01
- Word.by rsyring
- 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.
by hackernud3s - > 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?
by ElProlactin - > 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.
by ElProlactin - 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
by jaggederest - 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.by dewey
- 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.
by svachalek - 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.
by georgel - > If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.
Yup. That’s why rape and murder is so popular.
by antonvs - Stealing is also an effective way to enrich yourself, otherwise criminals wouldn't still be doing it.by account42
- Yeah, wish I’d ignored them sooner. “Spammers” don’t care if they bother people with offers that have no potential to benefit them. But actual entrepreneurs wanting to serve people with their products need to know that cold outreach is essential to get off the ground, and that they should fiercely ignore the people that call it spamming.by gigatree
- Cold outreach was recently discussed on HN some days ago with this comment even highlighted! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104838by vismit2000
- > 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.
- 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.
by bko