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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.
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
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.
Small nit: mailinator isn't really a "private relay," it's a public disposable inbox, anyone can read anyone else's mail there. Might want something like SimpleLogin instead. That said, the reputation-based opt-in list idea is genuinely clever.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, targeting matters way more than the personalization gimmick. We ran a tiny outbound thing once, sent 40 hand-written emails to exact-fit people, got 12 replies. Sent 2000 generic ones later, got 3. Relevance beats effort every time.
Ran cold email campaigns for a couple years. Opt-in channels (search ads, content marketing) convert worse per-touch but nobody's annoyed by them. Cold outreach only "works" because reply rates above ~1% still beat the cost of pissing off 99 people. That math is the problem.
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
Sure, people can try. But there's a difference between "contact" and "cold email at scale because it's cheap." We already ran this experiment with telemarketers and fax blasts in the 90s, got the Do Not Call list and CAN-SPAM out of it. Same fight, different medium.
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.
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
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.
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.