Cold Email Spammers Are Now Targeting IHers
I received an unwanted, unsolicited email communication, that was apparently sent out in bulk by someone claiming to be a "fellow Indie Hacker" trying to sell me something that I'd never be interested in.
Just wondering if some people are now using IH as a database and spamming left and right without researching about the subject.
Moderators have already expressed their views about it.
Edit: Since the sender has explained about his position, I have decided to edit this post to restrict the discussion on spamming (without researching about the subject and not sending a personalized message).
Trending on Indie Hackers
Okay is this for real? The least he could've done was personalize the message with some value :/
P.S To the guy who wrote this , if you are reading my comment then let me give you one big tip - "No one reads this long cold email. There is a reason why they call it cold email"
Hi Subro, I am the one who sent this email. I know the cold email is not personalised but I just started and am trying out new strategies to find validation for my idea.
While I appreciate you trying to tell the community about the cold email, I don’t think cold emailing is a bad strategy and honestly a lot of fellow indie hackers have given me a positive response for my idea, and even gave suggestions on how I can refine my cold email by directly replying to the email. I wish you would have done the same by emailing me personally instead of calling me out like this.
And regarding my idea, I am building a newsletter version of Capterra with deep analysis. I didn’t know about Softwareideas.io, but having researched about it now, it is different than my idea as it focuses on VC backed startups and try to help people understand how they can use the same startup ideas in a new niche.
My newsletter, on the other hand, will help people to find new and interesting tools that they can use to supercharge their product development. It might be similar but it is definitely not plagiarised.
A lot of ideas can be similar but it doesn’t mean they are the same. I am pretty sure most ideas on Indie Hackers exist in some form or other in the world. That doesn’t mean it is plagiarised.
Once again, I don’t get the point of your post and apologies to everyone who feels this cold email was trouble.
On a positive note, I appreciate all the comments for giving suggestions that cold emails should be short and more personalised to make them spot on.
I will learn from this and improve my strategies.
First of all, there's nothing personal about this post. I've omitted the name of the sender because my intention was not to call out someone - all I ask is to not misuse the contact information that people share on their profile based on trust.
If you decided to pitch an idea, have you already exhausted channels like posting about the idea in a community like we all do? You rather decided to bypass a communal discussion and send direct outreach emails which is against the conventions and would rather hurt people who are trying to do an outreach for a genuine reason. Imagine what will happen if even 20% people decide to follow this route and most people end up removing their contact info after receiving such spams. It's not supposed to work that way.
Also, the way this email was written implied that the sender have not done any research whatsoever about the target audience neither about potential competitors who are present in this same community (and that it the reason it classifies as spam).
I have nothing against cold outreach as long as it doesn't cross the line and becomes spam which it did in your case.
Also, if you're new to this community and others who are on the same boat, cold email is a risky strategy for beginners. It's natural to mark a mail as spam than to send feedback to the sender. That way it'll only hurt your reputation in the long run as Google might put a restriction on your id.
I have not tried to bypass communal discussion. I have been posting about my idea here on IH and other communities. Please don’t form presumptions. And as such there are no conventions for the right marketing strategy - you need to try things and learn from them, so someone can definitely start with cold emailing first.
I do agree with your point that spamming blindly is not a good strategy, but I don’t think I have crossed any line as there is no line that exists - a spam email for you might be a genuine outreach for others and vice versa.
You did omit my name from the screenshot you shared but you called the idea plagiarised and also shared the email’s content. I spent a lot of time on building my newsletter but now when I will try to reach people through cold email or try other ways of marketing, people will think of me as a guy who sends cold emails and think that my idea is plagiarised because of your post.
This community is supposed to be positive not negative. If you would have created a post to give constructive criticism highlighting WHY sending a cold email like this is not a good idea, and HOW it could have been better, could have helped not only me but the entire community here.
I've edited my post since you claim that you have not plagiarized from softwareideas. I'm not here to discuss plagiarism etc. The only problem is that I'm someone who'd be least interested in this kind of a product. So I'd like to know what research you did that made you think I'm the right audience for it.
Here's the guideline you should refer to: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business
How many of these emails did you send out?
It honestly looks like a bulk email to a scraped list of Indie Hackers and the reports of others receiving the same mail seems to indicate that.
The community, whether meant to be positive or not, is right to call this out as spam.
What made you think Subro here would make a good customer persona?
What a long email with no personalization.
I got lost and bored after "I".
The problem these days is anyone with a mail scraper and bulk email sender starts firing them like machine guns. This makes people go behind spam buster and personalized email writers putting in the hard work pay the price.
Have you ever seen Capterra and Indie Hackers in general? All products are just 'plagiarized' copies of another product or at least 1 specific feature of an entire platform that gets pulled and mildly updated. Then 'creators' post on IH asking about {sales|marketing|growth} only to get offended when pitched too? You would have lost your mind if you pulled up all of the SaaS platforms that copied Intercom's style and look....oh la la there's still a lot of learning to be done in IH about actually growing a business VS building something and just talking about it to someone else.
I've edited the post as I don't want this discussion to divert from the topic of "Using IH as an email database" to anything else.
This has been happening for some time. If you remove your email from your profile you'll get a lot less.
We took part in a well-respected accelerator that literally advised we cold emailed Indie Hackers all day long. haha.
Definitely try to do cold emailing professionally with personalised content that considers whether the email is genuinely relevant to the recipient though.
If you don't like cold email at all, don't publish your email address.
Simples.
Same. Getting these emails at least every 2 weeks. They just can get a cold email properly, wrong merge tags and no personalization. Buuuu
eh-yuck.
Got the exact same mail too. Given the low-effort message with no personalization, I'd say they aren't wasting time with targeting criteria.
Hehe.. spot-on. Hope this doesn't become a trend now.
Tl;dr, delete.
Do you Even Wonder? There are a lot of IH here who Apply this method for their business as well. 👎
Very weak example of cold outreach. I don't feel bad helping IH fellows. But this one is really boring to read:)
Any time that a post of mine makes it to the front page, I receive similar emails. This happens today, and it happened three years ago, too.
TBH don't mind those.
People reach out to me also when I make a post here and it gets some traction.
At least those emails are targeted and you can learn a thing or two from them.
This is just straight up spam.
That's interesting. Do you get messages specific to your posts or most of them are just spams?
I'd say it's 50/50. But every time a post of mine gets attention, I expect to find somebody in my inbox trying to sell me something.
damn, that's a shitty email, but one simple enough to mark as spam and carry about your day
That's exactly what I'd have done had he not mentioned "fellow Indie Hacker".. coz now he makes me think is it really worth to keep my contacts public here, who else is scraping this site to storm us with the next spam etc. etc.