The comments on cold outreach on HN are always going to be negative. I assume the majority of us here are developers and go to insane lengths to block "spammers".

That said, even YC (can't find the exact Dalton + Michael episode) encourages cold outreach. If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.

> If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.

The same can be said for all sorts of activities, from the illegal and unethical to the mundane.

Although, to be fair, you're right. Which is why I actively make it my goal to make doing cold sales outreach more costly to the companies doing it than if they had done nothing at all. A BDR cold emailing me is a pretty good way to make sure your software does not get considered by my organization, and I'm very likely going to cost their privacy/compliance team more time than they spent contacting me unwantedly in the first place.

Cold outreach is the only way I found to actually find users early on. No amount of blogs or social media stuff will get you users.

I had a product that got thousands of views from a Reddit post. Out of those, literally 0 clicked anywhere besides the page they landed on. I've been #2 on Product Hunt, 0 have actually used the product after clicking into it the first time.

Most products have a very tiny customer base, and they're not just casually browsing social media looking to find your exact product. You need to find these people and reach out to them directly.

Don't lie, but do little things that show them that you respect their time. Keep it short, tell them what the product is in plain English. Do some amount of research to qualify them as a potential customer. Try to tailor it to be relevant to them. Put your real name behind it. Ask them for feedback even if they wouldn't pay for your product. And don't follow up more than once or maybe twice.

It sucks. No one likes doing it. But if something is actually relevant for me, I would at least be curious enough to take a meeting. Unfortunately the only cold emails I get is from dev pod-shops or venture debt type people which are uninteresting.

Yeah, wish I’d ignored them sooner. “Spammers” don’t care if they bother people with offers that have no potential to benefit them. But actual entrepreneurs wanting to serve people with their products need to know that cold outreach is essential to get off the ground, and that they should fiercely ignore the people that call it spamming.

Cold outreach was recently discussed on HN some days ago with this comment even highlighted! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104838

> If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.

Yup. That’s why rape and murder is so popular.