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?
Why 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.
It's hardly pointless since local companies are more likely to profit from spamming because there is an inherently wider range of things they could sell you - so even just getting rid of them helps.
But that also doesn't really matter to this discussion - the law existing provides evidence that not wanting to receive unsolicited corporate communication is not a fringe opinion.
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 ?
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.
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.
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 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.
That 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.
Lmao “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”
That'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)
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
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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?".
What on earth are you talking about? Billboards are mostly illegal in my county, as they should be. But even if they weren't, this still isn't true. Most of my career, one of my primary jobs has been product selection. That part of your brain just doesn't turn off. I know it's hard to fathom, but I probably haven't made an impulse purchase in years, and 95% of the consumer goods we buy are from the retailer I work for. We base purchasing on attributes, period, and being pretty strict on things like no HFCS or artificial preservatives means very few national brands even make it through the sieve.
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.
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.
You are on point with what you have just said, and I agree with that as well. Other than that, the most important part, if you have to get the right users, is the right targeting, which is not in most of our control. If you are doing it on Reddit, product, and/or even news hacker as well, right now hyper-targeting is really important so that people can relate to it. Everywhere, they are already seeing the marketing. That is why ads work the best, because you can target the exact audience you want.
Even with the AI thing, I think YouTube and Instagram models are improved so much that they are now taking your content to the right audience, unlike before. They used to serve it to random 10 people, then used to see the engagement, and then improve on that. Now they are on different paths where they are doing psychology- and interest-based targeting, and cold outreach does exactly the same. Even if it is the slowest, it is the most powerful as well, one of the most powerful.
Some commenters did indeed discuss cold outreach, in spite of TFA author willfully misrepresenting his activity of “networking” as “cold” when it really wasn’t.
Come to find out that most HN commenters don’t know/care what “cold calling/email” actually entails, and that “networking” is somehow equivalent and equally miraculous!
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.
It's just the same thing viewed from two perspectives. For the sender, it's cold outreach - even when it's about some Viagra clone. For the receiver, it's spam - even when it's about AGI for $5.
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 | 18 hours ago
rsyring | 18 hours ago
ElProlactin | 17 hours ago
So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?
dgellow | 17 hours ago
ElProlactin | 17 hours ago
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 | 17 hours ago
ElProlactin | 17 hours ago
dgellow | 16 hours ago
ElProlactin | 16 hours ago
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 | 4 hours ago
ElProlactin | an hour ago
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.
account42 | 4 hours ago
But that also doesn't really matter to this discussion - the law existing provides evidence that not wanting to receive unsolicited corporate communication is not a fringe opinion.
gyanchawdhary | 17 hours ago
gyanchawdhary | 17 hours ago
Macha | 17 hours ago
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 | 17 hours ago
cpncrunch | 17 hours ago
anticorporate | 17 hours ago
If I don't know them, no, they may not.
ElProlactin | 17 hours ago
The best you will ever be able to do is (try to) ignore unwanted communication.
anticorporate | 17 hours ago
The more common scenario is that I waste more of their time than my own.
gyanchawdhary | 10 hours ago
singpolyma3 | 17 hours ago
antonvs | 16 hours ago
kerkeslager | 16 hours ago
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 | 12 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
account42 | 4 hours ago
heikkilevanto | 8 hours ago
dbbk | 4 hours ago
kimjune01 | 17 hours ago
nemomarx | 17 hours ago
warkdarrior | 17 hours ago
gigatree | 12 hours ago
rcxdude | 3 hours ago
account42 | 4 hours ago
rcxdude | 3 hours ago
singpolyma3 | 17 hours ago
shermantanktop | 17 hours ago
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."
hackernud3s | 17 hours ago
But I get a log of "we noticed your website isn't ranking in Google" spam which is not.
jaggederest | 17 hours ago
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 | 17 hours ago
kerkeslager | 16 hours ago
No, buddy, I do actually know what email I want to receive.
dewey | 16 hours ago
svachalek | 17 hours ago
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 | 17 hours ago
xgulfie | 17 hours ago
ElProlactin | 17 hours ago
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 | 17 hours ago
andai | 17 hours ago
Yeah, I can't wait to go back to being able to trust everything I read.
kimjune01 | 17 hours ago
kimjune01 | 17 hours ago
MeetingsBrowser | 17 hours ago
FinnKuhn | 8 hours ago
Gualdrapo | 16 hours ago
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.
georgel | 17 hours ago
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 | 17 hours ago
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 | 17 hours ago
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 | 16 hours ago
What might this look like for you?
(I don’t cold email except thanks or say questions btw, but I am curious!)
rcxdude | 3 hours ago
inigyou | 6 hours ago
Guess what, you only know the one that was on the billboard so if you need the product, you'll buy that brand. Happens every time.
anticorporate | 5 hours ago
dbbk | 4 hours ago
antonvs | 17 hours ago
Yup. That’s why rape and murder is so popular.
bko | 16 hours ago
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.
georgel | 16 hours ago
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.
imsurajkadam | 9 hours ago
Even with the AI thing, I think YouTube and Instagram models are improved so much that they are now taking your content to the right audience, unlike before. They used to serve it to random 10 people, then used to see the engagement, and then improve on that. Now they are on different paths where they are doing psychology- and interest-based targeting, and cold outreach does exactly the same. Even if it is the slowest, it is the most powerful as well, one of the most powerful.
vismit2000 | 13 hours ago
ButlerianJihad | 8 hours ago
Come to find out that most HN commenters don’t know/care what “cold calling/email” actually entails, and that “networking” is somehow equivalent and equally miraculous!
gigatree | 11 hours ago
inigyou | 6 hours ago
account42 | 5 hours ago
mikert89 | 17 hours ago
gigatree | 12 hours ago
SMAAART | 5 hours ago