Getting spammed: Ethics & legality of cold email
I'd be interested to know people's views on their ethics on sending cold email/messages and also the legality in their country.
It seems like on every channel I get cold outreach requests and only 5% of the people seem to have put thought into ensuring their offer is compelling & suited to me.
It's not legal to send cold e-mails with business offers to non-business users in the EU. I would be scared to get sued. We call this SPAM, here law calls this ~'unjust competition tactics'.
Oh the other hand, as an indie hacker I wouldn't be afraid to reach out to someone on Twitter or elsewhere (in fact, maaaybe even e-mail) IF and only if I saw that person (perhaps a CTO or cloud architect) could substantially be interested in my product and that could bring value to them. I also wouldn't phrase it as an offer, nor include pricing details, etc, but casually say something like "Hi xyz, I just saw your post on foobar. I really enjoyed that article. Because of your area of expertise, I thought you might be interested in product-name." I might even send that from my private e-mail, so it doesn't even look like a cold-email offer. I think if you're coming off the value-to-you angle, people would rarely consider it spam. Do note this is not legal advice - technically, sent by the business owner, that could still be considered spam. Cold e-mails are damn delicate business.