We all know that most successful startups got started by "spamming". Not everyone is a Google. For eg. Facebook spammed the Harvard mailing list. Youtube spammed Craiglist for hot girls to post on their site. Tagged got big fast by "spamming" too. See http://www.istokpavlovic.com/blog/?p=5
I'm sure many of plaxo's competitors would love to be in their shoes when everyone start cursing them. At least it's better than being ignored.
Now, given a choice, for your startup, would you spam? If yes, how do you handle the backlash? Ignore it?
As for myself, I think it is best to "spam". If I spam, i can grow more than twice as fast at the expense of the fury of maybe 10% of those spammed. But when those angry people started cursing you, you start to doubt whether what you do is right. But if you don't spam, there is a likelihood that you don't get the critical mass fast enough to fend off a future challenger.
I think "spam" in the sense of "creative advertising" like posting on Craigslist, posting to at least quasi-relevant mailing lists, etc is fine. Spam in the sense of unsolicited email and posting to unrelated sites (e.g. teenwag on news.yc) is absolutely evil and not OK. There's a fine line between evil spam and creative advertising, but as Justice Potter Stewart said in Miller v. California: "I know it when I see it".
Teen wag is like Microsoft+google+tagged on hyper turbo charge, and they are 14 year old kids no one can compete with 14 year olds except other 14 yers olds. they are beasts who ship out code every 2 hours
I too agree that there is a difference between "creative advertising" and spam.
It's one thing to make strategic posts so that your new community looks larger than it actually is. Reddit did this extensively early on, making pro-reddit comments on relevant blogs under pen-names, populating their own site with news submissions, etc.
It's something completely different to flood random sites with links to your startup (a-la teenwag).
Guys you might think what you want but teenwag, youtube, facebook are all amassing users and making them have fun at an unprecedented rate so stop analyzing n start wokring ;)
I think you really need to make a distinction between targeted announcements to relevant mailing lists and "spam", defined as unsolicited commercial e-mail.
Most successful startups don't spam. They identify a few mass-mailing forums and post to them. Linus Torvalds announced the original Linux kernel to comp.os.minix. Tim Berners-Lee posted the original WWW announcement to alt.hypertext. I believe Netscape was announced there too. Youtube and FaceBook announced their products by e-mailing all their friends. Facebook sent out an all-campus mailing. Reddit was announced on PG's site and comp.lang.lisp. My employer paid or is about to pay $1000 for inclusion in an industry trade newsletter. "Write yourself a Scheme in 48 hours" was first announced to the Haskell-cafe list, and then picked up by Reddit and del.icio.us. FictionAlley was announced on Cassie & Rhysenn and HP Paradise, two high-traffic Harry Potter fan mailing lists.
The key feature is that readers of these lists are looking for announcements like this. If you're interested in Minix, a Minix derivate is on-topic. If you're interested in hypertext, the world wide web is world-changing. If you're friends with someone, you want to know what they've been working on. If you're a Harvard student, you want to know about a website for Harvard students. If you're a Lisp user, you'd like to know about commercial startups using Lisp. If you're a Haskell hacker, you'd want to know about a Haskell tutorial. If you read Harry Potter fanfiction, you'd want to know about a Harry Potter fanfiction archive.
This is very different from what Teenwag is doing, spamming their site everyone. We don't care, and that's why it's annoying. When YC startups launch here, they get dozens of points. When rejected YC startups launch here, they at least get some discussion. When Teenwag posts here, they get killed, because we don't want to hear it.
Teenwag is a hot growing social networking site that is not funded by YC, so can you support non-YC funded companies or is News YC just a YC Funded pimp
Or even see what the other non YCers are innovating as far as I can see most of the YC companies are losers except for Reddit which was pimped like crazy by PG
Not more than once as a top-level post. Then keep watching the list and look for opportunities to plug your site in reply to someone else's question. For example, if you're with Octopart, and someone asks on a mailing list about electronics, "Anyone know where I can buy a Frobinator 42Z?": reply, "ACME Electronics seems to carry it. By the way, next time you should try looking on Octopart for this sort of thing."
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 55.3 ms ] threadI'm sure many of plaxo's competitors would love to be in their shoes when everyone start cursing them. At least it's better than being ignored.
Now, given a choice, for your startup, would you spam? If yes, how do you handle the backlash? Ignore it?
As for myself, I think it is best to "spam". If I spam, i can grow more than twice as fast at the expense of the fury of maybe 10% of those spammed. But when those angry people started cursing you, you start to doubt whether what you do is right. But if you don't spam, there is a likelihood that you don't get the critical mass fast enough to fend off a future challenger.
It's one thing to make strategic posts so that your new community looks larger than it actually is. Reddit did this extensively early on, making pro-reddit comments on relevant blogs under pen-names, populating their own site with news submissions, etc.
It's something completely different to flood random sites with links to your startup (a-la teenwag).
Most successful startups don't spam. They identify a few mass-mailing forums and post to them. Linus Torvalds announced the original Linux kernel to comp.os.minix. Tim Berners-Lee posted the original WWW announcement to alt.hypertext. I believe Netscape was announced there too. Youtube and FaceBook announced their products by e-mailing all their friends. Facebook sent out an all-campus mailing. Reddit was announced on PG's site and comp.lang.lisp. My employer paid or is about to pay $1000 for inclusion in an industry trade newsletter. "Write yourself a Scheme in 48 hours" was first announced to the Haskell-cafe list, and then picked up by Reddit and del.icio.us. FictionAlley was announced on Cassie & Rhysenn and HP Paradise, two high-traffic Harry Potter fan mailing lists.
The key feature is that readers of these lists are looking for announcements like this. If you're interested in Minix, a Minix derivate is on-topic. If you're interested in hypertext, the world wide web is world-changing. If you're friends with someone, you want to know what they've been working on. If you're a Harvard student, you want to know about a website for Harvard students. If you're a Lisp user, you'd like to know about commercial startups using Lisp. If you're a Haskell hacker, you'd want to know about a Haskell tutorial. If you read Harry Potter fanfiction, you'd want to know about a Harry Potter fanfiction archive.
This is very different from what Teenwag is doing, spamming their site everyone. We don't care, and that's why it's annoying. When YC startups launch here, they get dozens of points. When rejected YC startups launch here, they at least get some discussion. When Teenwag posts here, they get killed, because we don't want to hear it.
Has it occured to you that that might be because it's wrong?
MySpace took off in large part because of the 3 million strong mailing list of Xdrive users it had.