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.

> If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.

Yup. That’s why rape and murder is so popular.

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.

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.

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.

If I lie to you but you can’t tell, is that ok?

ah, the good old days where everything you needed to know was all signal no noise

> 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.

Correct. Unless a close personal friend

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.

That is exactly my position.

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.

That’s the case in germany. Unless you give your explicit consent of course

That’s the position the EU is currently taking with telemarketers. What’s the issue?

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.

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."

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.

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