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Ask HN: Should I use SPAM as part of my marketing campaign?

1 points by epynonymous ↗ HN
I'm a full stack developer and have an app that i'm trying to market. My first naive thought was to write a crawler that collects email addresses from lists of relevant websites (open sourced):

https://github.com/madsportslab/mkt

I've also been looking at mailchimp and sendgrid to do some email marketing campaigns, but I've come to the realization that I maybe turning myself into one of those things that I really hate--email spammer.

Is this something a lot of people have had success with or recommend? I can't remember the last time I was hit with random email from a reputable web company trying to sell me services, or perhaps gmail's spam filter is extra good about this. Mostly what I see from spammers are things like viagra sales or russian mail order brides, I can't honestly say that I've ever clicked on one of those emails so I wonder about the effectiveness in addition to the ethicalness.

I imagine the answer's probably word of mouth, getting a few customers under my belt by knocking on people's proverbial doors, seo, targeted online ads, etc.

I truly think I've got a good product, just need to get this in some people's hands.

Thanks in advance.

8 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 28.5 ms ] thread
benologist
Spamming email addresses will get your account shut down from email service providers, your domain will become blacklisted, and you might even get a fine per victim. Nothing about that will sustain your business, probably not even enough to ignite it anymore because MailChimp et al explicitly do not want you as their customer and they'll identify your intentions quickly.

Finding users for your product is the part where most startups and almost all your ideas will fail, but you have to search for something sustainable.

epynonymous
thanks, that's what my gut instinct was telling me sans the blacklisted part.

i think i should try to find actual users through the hard way, just networking with them and making introductions.

epynonymous
after thinking about this more, what's the difference between an introductory email versus SPAM? basically I'd be targeting an ideal customer (sports league) for an offer of a free service, not just some random post. would there be a difference if these were hand written emails?
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EJTH
Don't do it! Even if your product was exactly what I was looking for, I would never buy it if I recieved unsolicited marketing mails from you.

Just, don't.