Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

They went as far as calling my personal cell with a marketing/sales pitch. Their sales practices are obnoxious and the reason I will actively try and keep them out of any company I work with.

I would not take any of it so seriously. This is really common across multiple companies. I'm work in a Data Science org and get so much crap like this.

I think there is some CRM that automatically sends these emails to all the email addresses in their system. Your email address is easy to figure out since every company has something like first.lastname@company.com, finitiallastname@company.com etc. You can use LinkedIn to find people with a particular job title and then spam them.

The most comical set of emails I received was from a company that used an ever escalating set of words and images (e.g. a sad puppy) to try and make me feel guilty and respond. I found the sad puppy one so amusing I almost replied just to say the email made me chuckle.

Click the SPAM button and send it to your Junk Folder. Eventually the CRM system will realize you are never going to respond.

Occasional a sales person will contact me on LinkedIn or tries more personal ways to reach them, I just say that I'm not in a position to make any evaluation or purchasing decisions and I don't know anybody who does. That usually stops everything quickly.

It's a shame because the product really is excellent and engineers in general are particularly allergic to such scammy hard-sell sales tactics

Marketing spam is a fact of life. Just unsubscribe, delete, and/or ignore because nothing is going to change. There are entire industries (CRM, Marketing Automation, commercial data brokers, etc.) built on this.

If you’re in Europe (or a citizen living outside) you can make a GDPR subject access request to get a copy of your data. Try to specifically ask for a record of how your data was obtained. And you can also ask to be deleted permanently. It might or might not work but it’s what you are entitled to under the GDPR.

edit: check out https://yourdigitalrights.org/ which might give you some templates and check whether you’re covered by other privacy regulations in case the GDPR does not apply.

Yes, and yes they also reached out to me on my personal cell phone and on my work email. I blocked the gentleman, Philippe literally everywhere because I got so annoyed by him.

I also tweeted @datadoghq publicly to finally stop bothering me. No calls / emails / LinkedIn requests since then.

Lots of comments here saying "it's just marketing". I agree to some extent, but Datadog is easily the worst offender I've ever seen.

I work on a small engineering team and more than half the team got calls to their personal numbers and emails from Datadog. They are relentless. It's a huge turn-off, and I hope companies like this get named-and-shamed more often.

This does not look like marketing as such, it is usually generated as part of sales (cold) outreach, Sales/Business Development representatives send this type of thing to customers when they are prospecting.

Marketing is different strategy. SDRs/BDRs are looking at very specific accounts and targeting specific people vs marketing which is typically not specific.

This is pretty standard in the industry. I've been getting emails from Datadog for years. Not saying it's a good practice, but this is nothing new. This strategy must work because tons of successful companies do it.

This is why there is an unsubscribe link for unsolicited spam/ad email as legally required. Just use it. Unsolicited email isn't illegal so you just have to deal with it. I wish I was -only- getting spam from datadog that I could opt out of instead of unceasing spam from places that the unsubscribe link is just a confirmation that your email address is real.

B2B SaaS marketing is one of those things where its absolutely awful, and yet works well enough. So in light of the recent downturn managers are just cracking the whip and telling their marketing/development/sales/enablement people and tools to spam-harder. Taking an already bad experience and dialing up the volume.

As a buyer in the past I vehemently hated it. As a sales engineer now I fully realize i'm part of the problem, but have no solutions/alternatives to offer. Product led growth is my preferred approach but never have I ever seen a company not doing that switch to doing that.

I get a lot of Datadog spam, but was amusingly unable to actually convert a trial account into a paying account. I emailed multiple addresses multiple times, including the support email, the trial onboarding contact and the addresses that were spamming me, and nobody ever replied.

Found an alternative and haven't looked at them since.

EDIT: I had a similar but different experience with Google, where their sales were trying to convince me to switch to them from AWS. On the third call they arranged when we were going to talk about moving some ML workloads over, they just didn't show up and the 3 Googlers they invited to the meeting never contacted us again.

I got a cold call from them at my previous job, which was enough to make me write off using it, as a tech lead and senior in the org who could have gotten us all onboard. Especially since our tool at the time was failing us.

That said, at my new job they actually are using it and it IS a fantastic product. So... maybe cool it on the sales and marketing as that was actively counterproductive with me, when the product speaks for itself.

edit: I should add, I do put my phone number out there, the call was during business hours, and they didn't call any further after I said I wasn't interested, so looking at it objectively now it wasn't the worst experience.

Do Datadog really see returns on this? They are absolutely head and shoulders worse than the rest of the industry when it comes to aggressive "business development" / cold calling behavior.

My experience with Datadog has been that the product is pretty good (unbelievably expensive, like all monitoring solutions, but good), but the business development / marketing culture is a huge drawback to the deal.

At a previous employer, we actually had to get a special exemption from our engineering president when we felt Datadog was a good choice for our organization's needs. He was so upset with Datadog's incessant marketing that he would regularly make "you can buy whatever you want as long as it's not Datadog" jokes on calls.

My wife is friends someone a DD sales person. I had no idea what her husband did for a living since I didn't know either. So we go over to their house for dinner and he finds out I'm head of a devops/SRE team and I got a DD sales pitch for close to 2 hours.

I've never wanted to excuse myself to the bathroom and just sit in there doing nothing all night more in all my life.

I've had seen this from a number of companies: Datadog, Snyk, and Mongo are the most recognizable offenders, but I get this from dozens of companies every week. They ignore unsubscribe requests and my requests to stop contacting me when they call my personal number. I just report them to FTC now for not respecting the do not call list (which my number is on). Other than that, their tactics ensure their products don't even make it onto the list when we are considering a solution. We've gone with competitors in each applicable category.

Yes - pretty much every our engineer with “lead” in title was persietently attacked by them. They were so persistent that we needed to implement a company-wide block on their email domain. After that calls to personal numbers began. It went so far at one point we needed to make threats with legal action.

At one point we were on a market for solutin like theirs and we talked with their engineering (we temporarily lifted the block) and I have to say the product is solid (though not suitable for our needs, due to some specifics). We still use Vector. Soon after we needed to enable the block again.

I guess this is lame, but no different than 100s of other shops selling B2B services.

As an owner of a couple of companies, I get almost constant unsolicited spam, SMS, and calls.

I generally ignore most. Occasionally, if I feel confident it will be honored, I unsub.

I just feel that it is corrosive, professionally, to complain about/attack others in a professional fora.

For example, LinkedIn often has stuff posted that could be used as a powerful emetic. I just ignore it. I may take note of the author, for consideration in professional relationships, but I won't usually say anything about their posting.

There are a number of subreddits, dedicated to sneering at others; I am aware of ones dedicated to sneering at programmers (having been honored by their attention).

While these may be de rigueur, while in high school or early college, I believe that it's a bad idea to continue participating in these types of things, once we start earning a paycheck. Often, the people we slag, can end up in a position to do us favors, hire us, or fire us. Some corporations simply won't even consider us, if our name shows up in these places (I know that the one I worked for was obsessed with brand protection, and would not consider folks that they believed would not reflect well on their brand).

That also goes for posting attacks; no matter how "genteel," in places like this very forum. I generally avoid getting into pissing matches with folks, hereabouts.

As George Bernard Shaw said:

Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

It's not just Datadog. I've noticed a huge uptick recently in the amount of cold marketing spam to my business' email address--that I don't even have published anywhere but LinkedIn.

Surprise!

Dev sec ops… the industry is just trolling people with this shit now

They have repeatedly called my personal phone to “just check in” despite me telling them each time that I’m not interested. Never contacted them or gave them personal info as far as I can remember.

Yes loads of spam directed at individuals data harvested from linkedin in the last few months. I recently banned the domain.

I talked to one of their sales people once on the phone.

I don't really mind the effort. You have to sell to grow your business.