If I cold emailed you, I apologize | Hacker News Reader

If I cold emailed you, I apologize

blog.molecule.dev

30 pointsloh35 comments

He did the right thing wrong.

Cold emailing in the B2B space is totally normal. He just wasn't cold emailing. The sheer numbers alone, combined with the fact that he used some scumbag data broker to get contact info, means to me that he was actually just spamming people.

If he had individually researched each company, then after deciding he could likely help them, looked for the right contact in their org and personally contacted them, he would have ended up doing the right thing right.

He would have ended up sending more like 80 emails, not 800.

My main problem is that I didn't know how to find the exact type of person I'm looking for, so I cast a much wider net than I should have. I was told by an experienced salesperson that I should aim for ~100 emails per week, and then send followup emails to those same email addresses a couple days later, even if they don't respond to the first one, meaning I contacted ~400 people over the course of June. Part of the advice I received was that contacting the wrong person is okay, as they might forward me to the right person.

By the way, Apollo.io is a YC backed company, which was a huge part of my thought process. "YC? Based out of SF? Okay this must be how people do things these days." So against my better judgment, I gave it a shot.

It was definitely the wrong approach, but as someone with zero experience or knowledge of sales and cold outreach, there's no way I could have known that without trying first, especially with experienced salespeople telling me it's just what people do.

The volume is not the issue by the way nor is contacting the wrong person. You can properly cold email 400 people with a follow up. It’s probably going to take time to do it properly. The issue is entirely the content.

For cold emailing to be effective you need to have researched the company you are emailing a bit and give them enough in your initial approach that they want to follow back rather than send you to their spam folder. It means you need to show you understand their problem space, have a good grasp of how you could bring them value and having a chat with you would probably be worth their time if only so they know what’s available on the market for the problem you solve.

>But against my better judgment, in an attempt to replicate that first sale, I sent out maybe 800 emails over the span of a few weeks to potentially relevant startups and app development companies (targeted via Apollo.io),

Never heard of Apollo.io before so I went to their web landing page https://www.apollo.io which touts : "Search, engage and convert over 250 million contacts at over 60 million companies with Apollo’s sales intelligence and engagement platform."

That type of text would seem to set off all sorts of alarm bells about the service: "Hey wait a sec... how'd they get all those business contact email addresses? They couldn't possibly get 250 million people to willingly submit contact information for marketing?!?"

And some googling around does confirm that they're a data broker that scrapes sites like LinkedIn for contact information without people knowing about it. One google result was a HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23955944

The point of all the above is.... I can't see how sending any bulk marketing emails to a list gathered in a secretive and hostile way would be good for your startup product. Wouldn't many (most?) recipients wonder "How'd you get my email address?" which would poison whatever product you're trying to sell?

Does anyone have any legitimate success stories from using Apollo.io the way op tried?

++EDIT to be more specific about the scenario: an entrepreneur with a programming dev tool like https://www.molecule.dev/ that sent a bunch of cold emails via Apollo.io and got new customers. The target demographic of buyers for developer tools seems like the most hostile to reach via cold emails like that.

Does Apollo.io even reveal the actual email addresses to you ? Or do they only forward your marketing message?

There are many many of these and people use them all the time; most people at the levels they're being hit don't have time to wonder how you got their address (and for many, many companies it can be as simple as guessing their address format from other available ones, something like first.last@company is pretty easy to work out).

And if these people ever go to a conference, they likely hand out business cards with their info on them.

When it comes to scraped data it's usually even simpler: the scrapers got the email address from the website which lists their email address as the tech/marketing/sales/hr contact for their company, which is out there because sometimes people need to approach them with things which are legitimately relevant and of interest

Always mildly amusing when you get a pitch which refers to your website by someone that obviously hasn't visited it though...

Yeah, data brokers are awful and their business model is an abuse of the ideals of the internet imo.

I’ve been working on a tool to automate GDPR & CCPA deletion requests to data brokers - basically it’s a database of ~650 registered data brokers + email templates written in legalese. After the user provides some basic contact information, it does a simple mail merge.

https://github.com/AnalogJ/justvanish

Still a WIP

I've noticed that most of us contain a psychological quirk that when we believe we should do something that we really don't want to do, we subconsciously do the worst version of the thing we can as a form of self sabotage. Partially, it's so we can say to ourselves, "See, X doesn't work after all, I don't need to do it anymore" and partially, it's because we're secretly afraid of a blow to our ego if an action we staked our identity on being wrong turns out actually to be right.

Whatever the reason, it's a habit that you need to take notice of and exterminate within you. Other people aren't stupid. If enough other people are saying do a thing that you can't understand why anyone would do, don't bother doing it unenthusiastically. Either commit to an act of radical empathy and truly understand why other people are excited to do it or decide it's too much of a bother and don't do it.

Without reading the emails, I can't tell if the low response rate is due in any part to how the email is crafted but I have a reasonably high confidence based on the blog post that the author was intellectually capable enough to have executed a better cold email campaign but couldn't get over the psychological hurdle.

I'm pretty agnostic on cold emails as a strategy, but this article doesn't mention the specific sourcing method used here which I found a bit distasteful (but common) — scraping the HN "Who's hiring" thread:

  Hey Dylan!

  I'm Luke Hager with Molecule.dev, and I'm emailing you because I saw your post on HN. I've been looking around for companies like CALA who might be able to make good use of Molecule.dev. I see that you're using TypeScript, React, PostgreSQL, Node and other modern web/mobile tech.

At the very least this goes against the guidance in the monthly thread ("Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job")

I was (and still am) genuinely looking for work and to help companies build their products. My thought process was that if they're looking to hire an engineer, they're looking for someone to build their app, and I was offering a way to do that for them, faster.

This warm apology for a cold email is probably more effective as a marketing tool than and freezer load of emails. This is said without any intention of sarcasm. Today I learned about your project and it looks pretty cool. Good luck!

The pessimist in me is pretty confident that was the true purpose of this writing.

Nonetheless, hope it pays off for them.

>pessimist

You underestimate yourself. I would say "cynic" (a much higher aspiration), and I'm right there with you.

Question though: if you think that was the purpose, then wouldn't that be deceptive? If so, then why do you think it is that you "hope it pays off"?

I'd definitely disagree. This comes off as nothing but another marketing attempt. "Oh no, I'm so sorry I cold mailed you about MY SERVICE HERE PLEASE CLICK ON IT, so I'd like to publicly apologise on my branded blog and post it to HN, by the way here's the STORY OF MY SERVICE IT'S FANTASTIC and by the way I built THIS SERVICE TO HELP ME SPAM TOO PLEASE CLICK ON IT"

And no, I'm not trying to be cynical, it's just super damn obvious.

Sellers gotta sell.

Hey, live and let live, but this kind of scummy "apologising" is far worse than the cold mailing itself and absolutely despicably so misleading and manipulative.

I actually don't mind. He didn't force me to click the story, read it or click on through to the app. He didn't invite himself into my inbox. He wrote a piece "apologising" for this or that. Intent aside, it's still an interesting project and I wish him all the best. Gotta remember technical people don't really do "sales" very well. It's a hard learning curve and I appreciate the attempt.

It's not like I had physical injury because of his "apology" either, but this is absolutely morally wrong behaviour even if we specifically weren't affected by it, intent matters more than anything, and instead of actually taking to heart that cold mailing (which I don't think is even nearly as bad to start off with) is unfavourable he decided to strap on several layers of even more highly questionable behaviour. I know technical people don't do sales really well, but that isn't really a good excuse for doing this instead, and I don't believe we should allow this to happen without negative criticism.

It's not like this is an effective sales tactic either because intent matters and this is a clear demonstration of lack of ethical and moral values that could directly correlate to how customers are going to be treated.

I agree it's clearly not effective as a sales tactic, as we have a range or responses here from meh to negative, but none is "positive".

That seems accurate to me, just keep in mind that we were among the first comments at that time so it isn’t needless bashing looking at it now but was simply one of the first opinionated comments on the thread

I’ve started to get emails followed by text messages which include my name.

“Hey James, just thought I’d should you a quick text in addition to my email…”

I already mark any unsolicited email from a vendor as spam. The text is way too far.

I hate spam as much as any rational human, and to be honest I've never thought about this from the perspective of OP. You've worked hard to make something you're proud of but now how do you let people know about it?

There's a qualitative difference between a software author sending an email directly and some random mega-corp adding thousands of emails to a list with a hidden unsubscribe.

Good luck to you, OP. It'd be really interesting to hear more about how you work through this!

> You've worked hard to make something you're proud of but now how do you let people know about it?

By developing and executing a marketing plan. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So the guy personally hates cold emails and calls them spam, but then goes ahead and does it himself? + scraped the emails from HN

Sorry, but you are an idiot, harsh but don't care.

How dare you do regular business and try to grow your company, quality of life, and QOL of your customers?

You may assume your product will improve the QOL of your customers, but for most salespeople that reach me, that is not the case.

You also act like you have an entitlement to people's time just in case they may be a prospective customer - this is not the case.

Just don't open the message

That's the same way I explained it when I had the CEO of my competition murdered, but people still got mad.

Can't we accept an apology for a small mistake without retroactively justifying it?

I'd for one like to thank him for reconsidering, there's never been more ways in human history to advertise your business. Don't make a day worse for 800 people for a small edge. If your project is special you will find an audience by other means.

A lot of businesses and individuals give out a contact for business inquiries if they're interested in something like that.

Receiving spam really decreases my quality of life even at work. It also instantly puts you on my shit list and I won't do business with you even if I need the product.

I get a lot of spam from sales people at work (IT architect for a large Enterprise). A lot of them clearly never bothered to read my LinkedIn profile (offering solutions that have nothing to do with my field) but are really pushy, demanding a meeting and keep pinging me long after I've blacklisted them though their first email. Usually even including prearranged zoom meetings. I check my junk box once a month or so for legit emails and it's usually full of followups.

Of course I never respond as it will only cause them to follow up more and to demand names of more colleagues to harass.

If you really want me to be interested in what you have to offer, make sure I find it and hear great things about it when I go looking for something I need. It's a lot harder than just buying a list of emails and spamming but also a lot more ethical.

Can relate to your entire comment.

There's definitely a cadence of "followups", that tips into passive-aggressive. "Perhaps you missed my last email" or "if you're not the right person, please pass it along". The entire frame is that you owe them something or are somehow being rude by not replying, even when it's obviously automated spam. And they are positively relentless.

I find the approach especially grating and won't do business with these type, irrespective of what they're selling.

Emailing your audience, who has a legit interest in your products, is not spam.

Terrible straw man. The OP themselves explains why spam is much more than "doing regular business:"

> I was told that cold emails are just what B2B companies do and that it is widely accepted, [...] but it just doesn't feel right to me. For me personally, I hate cold emails. I associate it with spam. Do unto others, and all that. I actually hate spam emails so much that I made a custom email service to help combat it.

So there is no difference between "spam" and emailing someone information they've requested?

A better phrasing might be “how dare you cause me to expend time, effort, and attention in order for you to try to further your goals and those of your company”.

You are not qualified nor invited to asses your ability to improve mine or my customers’ quality of life, so it is all for you.

Cold contact in business is self interested, rude, and never justified. The only reasons not to reply to every one with “fuck off” are the time/effort, and that it confirms a working email address and that someone probably at least read the subject. (I suppose it might also look rude out of context if it came up in future, but it’s honestly the deserved response.)

Instead I add companies that cold email to the “do not use/work with” shit list for when I’m thinking about partnerships and service providers. (Actually the list manages itself - I just search for emails mentioning any provider we’re considering using and exclude those that have engaged in cold selling or similar.)

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