I've been doing GTM for I dunno... 20+ years now, I'm told I'm excellent at it. Never liked outbound, I've never found it's a good part of a GTM, and tbh it's always something I've considered mostly belongs with the folks who think "growth hacking" is a thing...I strongly believe in the pillars of traditional, early 1900s GTM... that is, build real trust, have a credible brand story, get word of mouth going by consistently exceeding expectations, and let your delighted customers become your most effective marketing channel. If you're going to do outbound, go to events or find places real customers might be hanging out and not annoyed by you talking to them. Inbound marketing and community-driven growth strategies have always seemed significantly more durable to me. When people genuinely need and seek out your product, when the recommendation comes from trusted peers rather than relentless cold emails or hyper personalized spam, your sales become robust, resilient, and scalable in a sustainable way, the problems with sales is they're always chasing the next lead. Maybe outbound might yield short term wins...but personally I've always thought... if you want lasting competitive advantage, invest your energy in creating a brand people truly want to share, that's how I've always thought about it anyway, and people have always seemed to enjoy my brands.
Outbound will never die, but fingers crossed lazy-ass sales and marketing does!
Thanks, I looked it up and all the results were for Google Tag Manager. That's just close enough to make me shrug and accept it but also be very confused.
Just to share a counterpoint: I think it’s impossible to get a product market fit without active outbound verification. If it’s a brand new project, balancing development commitment and GTM hours is crucial. If I understand your comment correctly, the brand marketing approach you are talking about works for products that verified their need, but if this is a brand new idea/demos committing to GTM instead of active outbound/ emails/ calls/ in person sales may be too costly.
Did you have a chance working on small / startup projects; how you balance development commitment?
I'd seperate PMF hunting and go to market just in case that's not what you're doing. I've done tons of small/startup GTM projects, most notabily I was on the deviantart zero to 1 and the digitalocean zero to 1. I wasn't clear enough. I'm not advocating that you should skip validation or assume a PMF, rather, you shouldn't even be thinking about a full, formal GTM until you've proven repeatable product market fit.
You're right that active, direct customer outreach in early stages, talking to real people at events, user interviews, forcing them to talk to you etc is the only way to validate and refine PMF. But to me, this isn't really "outbound" in the spammy, growth hacky sense that I critiqued above. It's thoughtful customer development: qualitative, deliberate, personal, strategic, and hopefully founder lead.
The real outbound I'm against is that lazy "spray-and-pray" approach, or the obsession with hyper personalized yet fundamentally shallow cold outreach that's mistaken for scalable growth. Real GTM, once you truly have PMF, is actually pretty mechanical and clinical. That said, personally, I've always treated early GTM as inseparable from product refinement. Every interaction early on is about learning and adjusting, (sorry Arch, you just had to go!) not aggressively scaling. "Rapid growth" is alluring, sure, but if it isn't anchored in real market validation, as you're pointing to: it ends up as expensive noise.
Am I correct in that much of the 0 to 1 is just like, getting some interactible artifact in front of potential customers, getting them to kick the shit out of it, identifying which of those people liked the artifact best, refining the artifact for THOSE types of people, then repeating the cycle? Like, there's no "market" yet, only your buddy Joe and some guys he knows.
Not really, well kinda, although lots of people skip the first step (well, most people try to skip a lot of steps sadly). You're describing something closer to early stage customer validation (ux/ui or otherwise) imo, (although experienced folks will tell you the playbooks and motions matter a lot, I agree, but that would be too much to get into), and while that iterative process is crucial, there's a key difference: real zero to 1 requires that you've also done a broader market analysis to understand where you're headed in a strategic sense, your "vision". That is not just about refining an artifact based on Joe and a few friends, it’s about deeply understanding the context your artifact fits into, including the broader market dynamics, existing customer pain points, competitive landscape, and whether this thing has legs to actually scale beyond those first friendly testers. (In business the answer is the answer, not what you want the answer to be: 5 customers, 500 customers, 5 million customers, there is an answer.)
Early feedback loops from Joe & friends can be misleading without also stepping back to ask strategic questions like: “How big is this pain?”, “Is this pain widespread or niche?”, and “What are the economic dynamics around solving it?” You’re not truly going from zero to 1 until you’ve mapped those answers and built a clear hypothesis around repeatable product market fit, which involves deliberate strategic judgment calls beyond just refining based on individual user reactions. When we launched DigitalOcean, several major tailwinds aligned perfectly, fueling rapid adoption. Chief among these was the dramatic, yet largely unnoticed, decline in SSD pricing, which Ben and Moisey Uretsky recognized early. Once they explain that change was happening in the world, I was able to understand and explain the whole business: SSD prices dropping allowing us to offer faster infrastructure at price parity (and eventually even lower than traditional providers). The Comp Sci degree was outpacing the MBA handily as an area of study, coupled with the explosive growth in developer focused startups (and startups generally), dissatisfaction with AWS complexity, and a rising wave of DevOps and containerization practices, we positioned ourselves perfectly for the incoming generation of developers. We came to a market with a genuine commitment to simplicity, love, community driven marketing, and API-first infrastructure resonated deeply, creating genuine trust and loyalty that became the foundation for rapid, sustainable growth. I was literally online 24/7365 making sure everyone was happy with everything (except that one time: sorry about that!!!!), just ask anyone here, I was on it.
tl;dr yes, iterate closely with early users, but pair that tight iteration with rigorous market understanding and strategy, if you're unaware of the broder market dynamics, you're at risk of solving only for a handful of early adopters and missing the real market entirely. (I don't like to mention my blog on HN, but I have a most you might enjoy: https://b.h4x.zip/founders/)
By definition, the Digital Ocean Zero to 1 can't have been a thing.
Providing services like virtual machines, managed databases, and Kubernetes clusters wasn't a groundbreaking innovation by the time DO came out in 2011. Even Heroku had been around for four years by then.
This. I actually already internalized fatigue and annoyance about being cold contacted starting at LEAST 15 years ago. If you reach out to me to try to sell me your product, my gut reaction is to block you and never buy.
I've been reading up on 70s and 80s technology firm histories (including game consoles) and it strikes me that marketing back then was much more strategic, much more about understanding the market, the value customers seek and how to deliver it.
For those rare companies that are trying to create a market out of nothing for a truly innovative product where there are no competitors or self identified customers, I can sympathize with the hollow allure of firehose marketing - but not only is this kind of startup vanishingly rare (and extremely risky), it’s also the wrong approach even for them.
If you are trying to build stairs into thin air, you need to have a constantly evolving “customer hypothesis” until you can nail down who your customer is. The only way to do that is with founder-led personal marketing, preferably F2F and on-premises. You must meet your customers at the place and time of need. If you are truly solving an unsolved problem, literally no one will know how to solve that problem with your product except you, or maybe even why the problem needs to be solved.
This is more market research than business development.
Depending on your market, moat, and vertical alignment with your customers, it -may- also be important to build brand awareness or “buzz” aside from customer contact, and this often will be non-personalized. For this, as well, firehose approaches like email are ineffective or even counterproductive. Keep in mind, this is marketing adjacent PR, not marketing. Don’t get carried away.
If you just need validation to feel “real”, stick to cheap office swag. It makes great memorabilia for the inevitable swag graveyard that successful founders usually create on their way to becoming successful founders. It also helps to combat hubris if you keep the graveyard on subtle display in your office.
I've got the misfortune of being connected to former sales colleagues on LinkedIn, so I see the kind of posts they are liking.
And I can't tell you how many of them are complaining when people complain about cold calling and mass sales emails. I've got a fairly even take on sales, but the absolute entitlement they feel about your time...
Amen. Extra special are the ones that when you complain about outbound, you get "well how else are we supposed to sell things!". As though "smiling and dialing" or carpet bomb spamming are the only possible ways. Appropriating other peoples time isn't enough; if we don't like being subjected to the entitlement, we're supposed to figure out how to do their job for them.
I’m so irritated by the constant emails I get as part of automated drip marketing campaigns. Many of them start with outright falsehoods (“I tried calling you”, “I spoke to one of your colleagues”, etc.) and they almost all pretend like they have not added me to a drip marketing campaign, ie they act like it’s a fully personalized email. Newer ones include clearly AI-generated summaries pulled from my online presence (“I see that you graduated from X college”, etc.) It’s so fundamentally dishonest. Why would I enter into a commercial relationship with you if our first interaction is you misrepresenting yourself or worse, outright lying to me?
> Why would I enter into a commercial relationship with you if our first interaction is you misrepresenting yourself or worse, outright lying to me?
A 'security' consultancy posted an article on LinkedIn on 'critical security vulnerabilities' they found on the web app from a company I worked at. The company hired them to do an assessment. The most critical vulnerability was a bug on a login page preventing registration.
So not only does cold calling work, bad-mouthing on social media seems to be a viable strategy. I'd have blacklisted them.
So not only does cold calling work, bad-mouthing on social media seems to be a viable strategy. I'd have blacklisted them.
Well that's the thing, isn't it? He (and others) may be thinking "Hey! This worked!". But he has no idea how many potential customers looked at LinkedIn and say "screw this guy" and will never do business with him.
>Amen. Extra special are the ones that when you complain about outbound, you get "well how else are we supposed to sell things!".
These people live in a different reality than the rest of us, one they've likely taken steps to convince themselves is true so they don't have to feel bad about their actions. I met someone years ago that was basically a professional email spammer that described his job as marketing and sending newsletters and was convinced that people were OK receiving spam and that he was providing a service by spamming garbage to people who didn't sign up for it.
Used to sit in the office with the cold call sales guys. Was crazy how often after the call ended they would start shit talking the contact for not buying the software.
It's not crazy at all, it's basic human psychological self defense. There are much better defense mechanisms that can be learned, but shit talking the opposition is basically the standard fall back psychological defense mechanism for human beings who have failed at something.
Sometimes I wonder if we as internet people are special in that it seems we can pretty immediately spot vanilla-LLM generated text. I'm sure others have noticed the same, but maybe 20% of my inbound recruiter pings on LinkedIn are straight from GPT and subsequently are immediately dismissed.
I posted a job on UpWork last month and probably 60% of the replies were LLM, some of them seemingly automated as they came in moments after I posted. Obviously these were immediately rejected.
Is this something we'll have to get used to?
I got my first internship in 2015 by cold-emailing the CEO of a Waterloo startup that I thought was really cool. At the time, reaching out directly over email with a thoughtful and earnest introduction was a good way to set yourself apart. I'm not sure that's the case anymore.
On one hand, I have potential candidates that I mentor who gleefully tell me how smart they are that they have LLM-backed bots replying to every remotely related job post on every platform. The idea that this approach might not be appreciated is generally met with either profound disbelief or dismissal as "luddite attitudes" or some such. "AI is the new hotness, how can it be bad that we're using it!"
On the other hand, I talk to HR folks, who are just as pleased with themselves that they've deployed ML-driven candidate filtering apps so only candidates that are 'perfect' matches for my job description are even seen by a person. And they do not appreciate it when I point out that must be why the only resumes I've seen from them are buzzword-bingo lists of 'qualifications' obviously included to game the filters, as most subsequent interviews make clear.
So...it seems to be an arms race that we all loose. Get used to it.
The problem for UpWork and their customers is what happens when 99% of the replies are LLM generated. The same when everything Google links to is LLM generated or even worse when their LLM summary is generated from LLM content they have been slurping up. The whole sad edifice may well collapse in on itself.
I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the commercials I think was from Facebook (IIRC, it could have been Google...). It was directed toward students, so I'm pretty sure it was an organic ad, but there were several aspects to it that felt fairly personalized to me (bicycling and outdoor related) that I actually wondered if it was generated on the fly using an LLM.
FB knows me and what I like and they have enough of data on my searches that they could customize a pretty relevant audio ad that, now with LLMs, can feel really relevant and natural, especially with audio gen being so good.
My point though is I wasn't sure if it was LLM generated or not and that's stuck with me. Random ChatGPT copy-pasta is easy for me to pick out – most people do not write that well. But a sophisticated application of this tech probably approaches the it-could-go-either-way territory.
I genuinely loathe the over-familiar vibe you get from targeted ads in such a way where no matter how relevant to me the given product is, if you advertise it like that, I'm immediately suspicious of your intentions. If I'm talking about longboards a lot around my house and get ads for longboards, I would go so far as to say I would go out of my way to not buy any of the brands shown to me.
I think this is an underrated metric in terms of how advertisers are organizing their spend; the creep factor. If your first impression with a potential customer is creeping them out, how are the odds of them giving you a sale?
I have a similar annoyance: the obvious ways marketeers try to get me in their funnel (I call it conversion aversion). It's hard to measure, so it's not taken into account by marketeers, but I'm quite certain the amount of people annoyed by conversion optimization tactics represent a lot of potentially lost sales.
By virtue of what I do, I interact with quite a few of our SDRs who do outbound calls all day long AND I am frequently on the receiving end of someone else's calls. It is a hard job. Attention is a very scarce commodity and the shotgunning of the LLM swill that has completely taken over the outbound has made it even scarcer.
A fun thing happened recently. At sales kick off I was having lunch in the mountain skiing and a few young SDRs joined me with their burritos. We were chatting and I got an inbound call from some random numberI picked up and sure enough it was an SDR from some random SaaS that's been trying and failing to reach me. I told that SDR, hey, you got me and 3 of your fellow SDRs here, take your best shot, you will be rated by people who do your job. Ha, he did pretty good! Our SDRs gave him a bunch of sh*t about not using the right call dialer management. It was a "closed lost" opportunity for them.
Somehow my personal phone number leaked into some database, and I get multiple SaaS calls per day. I welcome the day when it's all AI because I hate to be rude to real people but these sorts of calls almost force it.
I'm less hesitant to be rude to telemarketers anymore. Yes, they have a shitty job, yes, it's not their fault that your number is on their list. But it's a job they are choosing to do, knowing they are an integral part of the problem. Kind of like the "Contractors on the death star" ethical example.
If someone was paid to kick my puppy, I'm not going to just be OK with it because, "hey it's their job, and we're all struggling."
As soon as I notice they are reading from the script and aren’t the delivery person waiting with my package I just hang up immediately. No comment, I don’t even give them a chance to try to keep me on the line.
Yes, low wage workers have so many wonderful opportunities to not get evicted or starve. Don't confuse middle-class and wealthy workers with poorer ones.
Just reminded yourself that they've chosen to remove themselves from the pool of 'real people' by participating scammy activities. They're the ones that have broken the social contract and treating them with respect just lets them continue to believe they aren't doing anything wrong.
Same thing happened to me. I probably get ten calls per day. I just don’t answer the phone any more unless I recognize the number. It’s very annoying. If I accidentally answer a spam call, most of the time I’ll just hang up. But I’m also very annoyed with telephone companies. Why isn’t there a “report spam” button for phone calls?
Wild take. Almost every single company of a certain size does outbound. Just like how almost every company sends endless marketing emails. Yeah its spammy. But it also converts some small percentage of users so they will continue to do it.
OK, was just curious. I only think of it as unsolicited mass email. If something's tailored to me or a call, I just think of it as part of doing business.
Spam is any communication the recipient doesn't want. The definition is by the recipient, not the initiator.
The term has moved to other forms of mass unsolicited advertising.
The first spams weren't email but Usenet (notably Cantor and Siegel's "Green Card" spam, which I remember, though that wasn't the first[1]).
We've now got email spam, Web spam, forum spam, SMS spam, phone spam, etc., etc., etc.
The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited.
Keep in mind that robocallers (which may have an automated or human at the other end) are dialing billions of numbers in the US per month[2].
Amongst other considerations: spammed networks die as those who find them intolerable defect from them. Phones (and Usenet, and email) were once exclusive, and hence, where intelligent and desired communications were to be found. As costs of utilisation and access fell, that is no longer the case. An instance of the Jevons Paradox as well as Gresham's Law: falling costs leads to increased use, falling barriers to participation makes bad usage drive out good. Direct-dial, universal-access telephony is teetering on the edge of death.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Brad Templeton has a history and etymology dating to at least 2001, which makes clear that the term arises from any unspecified "net abuse", with his first instance being in 1978. The phone system is itself a network. "Origin of the term "spam" to mean net abuse" <https://web.archive.org/web/20120716231643/http://www.temple...>.
> Spam is any communication the recipient doesn't want. The definition is by the recipient, not the initiator.
If this is also true:
> The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited.
Say I send an unsolicited email by typing it to a businessperson I want to sell my product to. They get my email and didn’t want to receive it. But it wasn’t mass and it was unsolicited.
> I'll trust in your capacity to resolve any concerns with what I wrote.
Yes, that is what I would do as well if I didn't want to answer a clear question.
> But yes, it is spam.
So then you retract this, "The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited." because the only requirement is that the recipient see it as spam?
There’s documented UCE from before, but Cantor and Siegel is regarded as the first sustained spam campaign. As for the term itself, it comes from the BBS era, referring to flooding a chat with the traditional Viking chant of “spam spam spam spam”
I mean there's a legal definition of it. I personally don't think cold calling someone to make a sale is spam. The caveat being that if they tell me to not call again, I won't.
And LinkedIn messages don't bother me as long as they follow the rules of the site which don't prohibit cold outreach.
Strong disagree. My personal number has also leaked and I get 5-10 cold calls per day. They call during important work meetings. They call during dinner with my family. They call when I'm away on vacation. I will never, ever willingly buy any product from these calls.
Don't know when that will get here, but when it does (and better AI-powered spam filtering), I think a lot of these problems will disappear, and a lot of sales teams are going to have to rethink.
Based on the social contract that calling people unasked for to try and sell them stuff is unacceptable. Only assholes need this explained to them, normal people inherently understand it, the fact that you don't says something about your character or your intelligence.
For LinkedIn specifically, not only does it not prohibit cold outreach, but Sales Navigator, which is specifically set up to give you broader access to do cold outreach, is a major part of the product.
You're signing up to be sold to when you sign up to LinkedIn.
You always make great points. For my comments, I was mainly thinking of the <$50k range where I've worked most. I did do a b2g startup that failed in part because the motions are fucking nuts jfc. So to your point: sales motions should differ dramatically based on price point. For enterprise deals ($500k+), strategic outbound still makes perfect sense, tho I'd argue you should prime the market first with a brand awareness campaign.
Thank you for narrowing your claims, you might want to update your post at the top of the thread to call out your ADV/ACV assumption.
I appreciate all the experience and advice you’re offering on this thread! Take my feedback as a nitpick: as I was reading through your top post, my initial thought was “this isn’t true all the time” because I spent 6 years in 2 separate startups with significant and successful outbound sales where our ADV > $100k.
One company stayed private and profitable while driving revenue north of $80M/yr; and the other company sold enough long-term enterprise contracts to be acquired by a bigger $B company.
I mean, aside from being comfortable with longer sales cycles and taking the time to build more advocates on the enterprise side, I haven't seen a substantial difference across this spectrum (<1K is very different). All are best when the relationship-building is first and foremost.
I've always been a relationship seller. I agree that a lot of the AI hype surrounding outbound is going to be short lived. When everyone can do infinite outbound, no one will be able to break through. The AI arms race to get a slight edge on response rates is going to destroy that channel.
I've been working on https://humancrm.io to scratch my own itch. A CRM that helps me stay focused on relationships. I'm explicitly not adding any AI or automation to it.
Thanks! HumanCRM is similar to Monica in its people focus (I also add my friends into HumanCRM), but is definitely more oriented towards professional networks. I'm also starting out with more focused feature set: emphasizes connecting with people rather than recording information.
So there is only a handful of primary entities: Humans, Leads, Deals, Communities (thus no Pets, Contacts, Tasks, Photos, Documents, etc).
I might expand it to capture more data in the future, but waiting to see what users make use of.
I’ve been looking for something to get better at my personal contacts. I’m not really on LinkedIn. Maybe I’ll get on just to try this, but reach out if I could try it some other way.
Thanks, I hope so too! I think by the end of the year sales AI disillusionment will really start set in and I'll have polished HumanCRM enough by then. All of the existing CRM players are going heavy into automation so this might stand out.
Most people do that except in the rare instance where they find a product that really satisfies their needs. But farming those rare instances is precisely the goal of outbound marketing. You had a meeting just yesterday about how it'll take 9 months to staff up a team that can foobar your widgets, and sitting in your inbox there's an email from someone who says they can start foobaring your widgets next week. The same email went out to a bunch of people who already have a team or don't run widgets, but neither you nor the salesperson cares about them.
The ads are kind of sneaky these days. It’ll be in the form of astroturfing, paying influencers to shill stuff, using bots to downvote negative reviews, etc.
AI good enough to pitch me but not good enough to read my email and alert me of products I should actually care about seems like the dystopian outcome ad-tech typically reaches.
I think for that to happen, you'd have to let a sophisticated AI read your emails, which maybe possible with the right home setup, but otherwise you're sending them to be read by a large corporation's.
This is why the “Lean Startup” movement popular in early 2010s ultimately died: The market eventually got tired of every new startup being some vaporware product market fit test where a product wasn’t even fully built out because the founders wanted to push risk onto customers instead of going all in.
So now you have to do all the big things upfront and come to market with a fully polished professional offering to be taken seriously.
From my perspective, as someone who is not good at marketing and sales, this is going to be positive because the playing field will have to focus more on product. Currently, I'm being out-competed by people who can sell well. A landing page with nothing behind it is out-competing my fully working product.
If outbound sales becomes ineffective, people will have more opportunities and time to think about their inherent needs, as opposed to being funneled into all their decisions by a salesperson.
It's frightening how much stuff people are buying that they don't need. While there exist stuff which they need that they don't know exists.
I don't think messaging has improved - maybe on avg. but it's still clearly AI-generated.
The number of companies that "Elevate" services/quality/experiences... It's getting so sloppy.
But a lot of these points are recurring ones over the years, it's just like a rubber band that stretches.
At some point, CEOs will go on LinkedIn ...
"We loved the AI boom and it helped us improve a lot of our processes! But we need human connection, and that's irreplaceable - but now our differentiator is that we have humans reaching out to humans. AI will still be here as a sidekick."
> Having a good Twitter/social media presence will become a compulsory pre-condition. The company owned channels (like websites, email lists or apps) where you have direct access to customers will become key demand generation pipelines.
The ability to control their own media presence is what still makes me believe that ActivityPub has a future, but it depends on companies and marketers realizing that they need to be proactive about it; instead of just sitting on their hands and chasing the audiences wherever they think they are going.
I think that most marketers are aware that controlling your own mailing list is important; this is why so many of them post on every platform, have podcasts, and try to get you to sign up for their newsletter.
The issue with federated projects is that they lack the content to attract users and they lack the users to generate content.
> The issue with federated projects is that they lack the content to attract users and they lack the users to generate content.
This is why I wrote "it depends on companies and marketers realizing that they need to be proactive about it".
It costs next to nothing to set up a server and configure a bot that mirrors your twitter posts to the Fediverse. If they done just that, they'd be solving their end of the chicken-and-egg problem, and all they would need then is some patience and treat it as a Pascal Wager, where every round of "Here's something stupid that Musk did today" would be a change for them to convert the users to their preferred network, or to just maintain the status quo.
I think you’re overestimating how many of these promoters could figure out how to set up a server by themselves. Most of the ones who can will just stick with the proven technology (email).
I want the technology to work out, I just don’t see it happening anytime soon. Think of Linux and Firefox; both have been best in category products for years, but neither one has an appreciable market share.
> how many of these promoters could figure out how to set up a server by themselves
I am not talking about setting up a server by themselves.
Managed hosting is a thing. People can get their own media presence without any technical expertise for less than $40/year. (https://communick.com/services/takahe) I am just talking about getting them being curious enough to find a service provider that can do it for them.
In the face of this AI-powered sales onslaught, customers will use AI-powered tools to analyze and evaluate all corporate products and services to make their purchasing decisions, without talking to anyone. Personal connections won’t be the solution to sales when customers trust their personal AI agents even more than real-life contacts.
It's already happening in HR and recruiting, but people still trust their network more. Their real network, not salespeople who sent a LinkedIn invite.
Fun fact: in my language (Polish) those AI generated voices are unbearable. I understand that this can improve making them indistinguishable from real person, but so far it all sounds to us like a fake person from temu.
> While I think these AI powered sales products are going to perform very well in the short run, this is also going to cause a certain about of fatigue for the users and customers.
I mean, speaking for myself, the fatigue is real and it’s been here for years.
I don’t think LLM content is going to make cold emails seem any warmer. I’ve never opened one and thought “if only this high-volume automated text were slightly more personalized.”
That said, I keep getting them. Seems like nothing can kill outbound, and I doubt LLMs will either.
I've been doing GTM for I dunno... 20+ years now, I'm told I'm excellent at it. Never liked outbound, I've never found it's a good part of a GTM, and tbh it's always something I've considered mostly belongs with the folks who think "growth hacking" is a thing...I strongly believe in the pillars of traditional, early 1900s GTM... that is, build real trust, have a credible brand story, get word of mouth going by consistently exceeding expectations, and let your delighted customers become your most effective marketing channel. If you're going to do outbound, go to events or find places real customers might be hanging out and not annoyed by you talking to them. Inbound marketing and community-driven growth strategies have always seemed significantly more durable to me. When people genuinely need and seek out your product, when the recommendation comes from trusted peers rather than relentless cold emails or hyper personalized spam, your sales become robust, resilient, and scalable in a sustainable way, the problems with sales is they're always chasing the next lead. Maybe outbound might yield short term wins...but personally I've always thought... if you want lasting competitive advantage, invest your energy in creating a brand people truly want to share, that's how I've always thought about it anyway, and people have always seemed to enjoy my brands.
Outbound will never die, but fingers crossed lazy-ass sales and marketing does!
For the outsiders here (like me) GTM = Go-To-Market
https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/trends/go-to-market-strateg...
Thanks, I looked it up and all the results were for Google Tag Manager. That's just close enough to make me shrug and accept it but also be very confused.
Just to share a counterpoint: I think it’s impossible to get a product market fit without active outbound verification. If it’s a brand new project, balancing development commitment and GTM hours is crucial. If I understand your comment correctly, the brand marketing approach you are talking about works for products that verified their need, but if this is a brand new idea/demos committing to GTM instead of active outbound/ emails/ calls/ in person sales may be too costly.
Did you have a chance working on small / startup projects; how you balance development commitment?
I'd seperate PMF hunting and go to market just in case that's not what you're doing. I've done tons of small/startup GTM projects, most notabily I was on the deviantart zero to 1 and the digitalocean zero to 1. I wasn't clear enough. I'm not advocating that you should skip validation or assume a PMF, rather, you shouldn't even be thinking about a full, formal GTM until you've proven repeatable product market fit.
You're right that active, direct customer outreach in early stages, talking to real people at events, user interviews, forcing them to talk to you etc is the only way to validate and refine PMF. But to me, this isn't really "outbound" in the spammy, growth hacky sense that I critiqued above. It's thoughtful customer development: qualitative, deliberate, personal, strategic, and hopefully founder lead.
The real outbound I'm against is that lazy "spray-and-pray" approach, or the obsession with hyper personalized yet fundamentally shallow cold outreach that's mistaken for scalable growth. Real GTM, once you truly have PMF, is actually pretty mechanical and clinical. That said, personally, I've always treated early GTM as inseparable from product refinement. Every interaction early on is about learning and adjusting, (sorry Arch, you just had to go!) not aggressively scaling. "Rapid growth" is alluring, sure, but if it isn't anchored in real market validation, as you're pointing to: it ends up as expensive noise.
Am I correct in that much of the 0 to 1 is just like, getting some interactible artifact in front of potential customers, getting them to kick the shit out of it, identifying which of those people liked the artifact best, refining the artifact for THOSE types of people, then repeating the cycle? Like, there's no "market" yet, only your buddy Joe and some guys he knows.
I don't care if they 'like' it, I care if they'll fight me when I take it from them.
Ah, yes, the legendary pugilistic market fit!
Not really, well kinda, although lots of people skip the first step (well, most people try to skip a lot of steps sadly). You're describing something closer to early stage customer validation (ux/ui or otherwise) imo, (although experienced folks will tell you the playbooks and motions matter a lot, I agree, but that would be too much to get into), and while that iterative process is crucial, there's a key difference: real zero to 1 requires that you've also done a broader market analysis to understand where you're headed in a strategic sense, your "vision". That is not just about refining an artifact based on Joe and a few friends, it’s about deeply understanding the context your artifact fits into, including the broader market dynamics, existing customer pain points, competitive landscape, and whether this thing has legs to actually scale beyond those first friendly testers. (In business the answer is the answer, not what you want the answer to be: 5 customers, 500 customers, 5 million customers, there is an answer.)
Early feedback loops from Joe & friends can be misleading without also stepping back to ask strategic questions like: “How big is this pain?”, “Is this pain widespread or niche?”, and “What are the economic dynamics around solving it?” You’re not truly going from zero to 1 until you’ve mapped those answers and built a clear hypothesis around repeatable product market fit, which involves deliberate strategic judgment calls beyond just refining based on individual user reactions. When we launched DigitalOcean, several major tailwinds aligned perfectly, fueling rapid adoption. Chief among these was the dramatic, yet largely unnoticed, decline in SSD pricing, which Ben and Moisey Uretsky recognized early. Once they explain that change was happening in the world, I was able to understand and explain the whole business: SSD prices dropping allowing us to offer faster infrastructure at price parity (and eventually even lower than traditional providers). The Comp Sci degree was outpacing the MBA handily as an area of study, coupled with the explosive growth in developer focused startups (and startups generally), dissatisfaction with AWS complexity, and a rising wave of DevOps and containerization practices, we positioned ourselves perfectly for the incoming generation of developers. We came to a market with a genuine commitment to simplicity, love, community driven marketing, and API-first infrastructure resonated deeply, creating genuine trust and loyalty that became the foundation for rapid, sustainable growth. I was literally online 24/7365 making sure everyone was happy with everything (except that one time: sorry about that!!!!), just ask anyone here, I was on it.
tl;dr yes, iterate closely with early users, but pair that tight iteration with rigorous market understanding and strategy, if you're unaware of the broder market dynamics, you're at risk of solving only for a handful of early adopters and missing the real market entirely. (I don't like to mention my blog on HN, but I have a most you might enjoy: https://b.h4x.zip/founders/)
This is extremely helpful! Thank you for your time!
just wanted to say, fantastic note. thanks for sharing!
By definition, the Digital Ocean Zero to 1 can't have been a thing.
Providing services like virtual machines, managed databases, and Kubernetes clusters wasn't a groundbreaking innovation by the time DO came out in 2011. Even Heroku had been around for four years by then.
Don't build until you have received payment from customers. Otherwise you absolutely won't know what to build.
Don’t pay until you’ve seen a working product, otherwise you don’t know what you’ll get…
Ha! Sometimes you don’t know what you’re getting even with a demo of a working product.
This. I actually already internalized fatigue and annoyance about being cold contacted starting at LEAST 15 years ago. If you reach out to me to try to sell me your product, my gut reaction is to block you and never buy.
Spoken like a real Theodore Levitt-fan!
I've been reading up on 70s and 80s technology firm histories (including game consoles) and it strikes me that marketing back then was much more strategic, much more about understanding the market, the value customers seek and how to deliver it.
Marketing today feels like a grift.
For those rare companies that are trying to create a market out of nothing for a truly innovative product where there are no competitors or self identified customers, I can sympathize with the hollow allure of firehose marketing - but not only is this kind of startup vanishingly rare (and extremely risky), it’s also the wrong approach even for them.
If you are trying to build stairs into thin air, you need to have a constantly evolving “customer hypothesis” until you can nail down who your customer is. The only way to do that is with founder-led personal marketing, preferably F2F and on-premises. You must meet your customers at the place and time of need. If you are truly solving an unsolved problem, literally no one will know how to solve that problem with your product except you, or maybe even why the problem needs to be solved.
This is more market research than business development.
Depending on your market, moat, and vertical alignment with your customers, it -may- also be important to build brand awareness or “buzz” aside from customer contact, and this often will be non-personalized. For this, as well, firehose approaches like email are ineffective or even counterproductive. Keep in mind, this is marketing adjacent PR, not marketing. Don’t get carried away.
If you just need validation to feel “real”, stick to cheap office swag. It makes great memorabilia for the inevitable swag graveyard that successful founders usually create on their way to becoming successful founders. It also helps to combat hubris if you keep the graveyard on subtle display in your office.
Sure I am! A great read: https://hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia
Marketing was always a grift when it was done to get rich quick, yesterday or today. Products, brands, businesses... take a long time to bake!
I've got the misfortune of being connected to former sales colleagues on LinkedIn, so I see the kind of posts they are liking.
And I can't tell you how many of them are complaining when people complain about cold calling and mass sales emails. I've got a fairly even take on sales, but the absolute entitlement they feel about your time...
Outbound can't die soon enough.
Amen. Extra special are the ones that when you complain about outbound, you get "well how else are we supposed to sell things!". As though "smiling and dialing" or carpet bomb spamming are the only possible ways. Appropriating other peoples time isn't enough; if we don't like being subjected to the entitlement, we're supposed to figure out how to do their job for them.
I’m so irritated by the constant emails I get as part of automated drip marketing campaigns. Many of them start with outright falsehoods (“I tried calling you”, “I spoke to one of your colleagues”, etc.) and they almost all pretend like they have not added me to a drip marketing campaign, ie they act like it’s a fully personalized email. Newer ones include clearly AI-generated summaries pulled from my online presence (“I see that you graduated from X college”, etc.) It’s so fundamentally dishonest. Why would I enter into a commercial relationship with you if our first interaction is you misrepresenting yourself or worse, outright lying to me?
> Why would I enter into a commercial relationship with you if our first interaction is you misrepresenting yourself or worse, outright lying to me?
A 'security' consultancy posted an article on LinkedIn on 'critical security vulnerabilities' they found on the web app from a company I worked at. The company hired them to do an assessment. The most critical vulnerability was a bug on a login page preventing registration.
So not only does cold calling work, bad-mouthing on social media seems to be a viable strategy. I'd have blacklisted them.
So not only does cold calling work, bad-mouthing on social media seems to be a viable strategy. I'd have blacklisted them.
Well that's the thing, isn't it? He (and others) may be thinking "Hey! This worked!". But he has no idea how many potential customers looked at LinkedIn and say "screw this guy" and will never do business with him.
>Amen. Extra special are the ones that when you complain about outbound, you get "well how else are we supposed to sell things!".
These people live in a different reality than the rest of us, one they've likely taken steps to convince themselves is true so they don't have to feel bad about their actions. I met someone years ago that was basically a professional email spammer that described his job as marketing and sending newsletters and was convinced that people were OK receiving spam and that he was providing a service by spamming garbage to people who didn't sign up for it.
Sounds like roughly the same process defense industry professionals take to rationalize their "career" ^.^
Every human on earth, except for literal saints.
LinkedIn itself is a horror, but sales and HR people on it are the final circle of Dante's hell.
Used to sit in the office with the cold call sales guys. Was crazy how often after the call ended they would start shit talking the contact for not buying the software.
It's not crazy at all, it's basic human psychological self defense. There are much better defense mechanisms that can be learned, but shit talking the opposition is basically the standard fall back psychological defense mechanism for human beings who have failed at something.
Sometimes I wonder if we as internet people are special in that it seems we can pretty immediately spot vanilla-LLM generated text. I'm sure others have noticed the same, but maybe 20% of my inbound recruiter pings on LinkedIn are straight from GPT and subsequently are immediately dismissed.
I posted a job on UpWork last month and probably 60% of the replies were LLM, some of them seemingly automated as they came in moments after I posted. Obviously these were immediately rejected.
Is this something we'll have to get used to?
I got my first internship in 2015 by cold-emailing the CEO of a Waterloo startup that I thought was really cool. At the time, reaching out directly over email with a thoughtful and earnest introduction was a good way to set yourself apart. I'm not sure that's the case anymore.
Is this something we'll have to get used to?
On one hand, I have potential candidates that I mentor who gleefully tell me how smart they are that they have LLM-backed bots replying to every remotely related job post on every platform. The idea that this approach might not be appreciated is generally met with either profound disbelief or dismissal as "luddite attitudes" or some such. "AI is the new hotness, how can it be bad that we're using it!"
On the other hand, I talk to HR folks, who are just as pleased with themselves that they've deployed ML-driven candidate filtering apps so only candidates that are 'perfect' matches for my job description are even seen by a person. And they do not appreciate it when I point out that must be why the only resumes I've seen from them are buzzword-bingo lists of 'qualifications' obviously included to game the filters, as most subsequent interviews make clear.
So...it seems to be an arms race that we all loose. Get used to it.
>Is this something we'll have to get used to?
The problem for UpWork and their customers is what happens when 99% of the replies are LLM generated. The same when everything Google links to is LLM generated or even worse when their LLM summary is generated from LLM content they have been slurping up. The whole sad edifice may well collapse in on itself.
I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the commercials I think was from Facebook (IIRC, it could have been Google...). It was directed toward students, so I'm pretty sure it was an organic ad, but there were several aspects to it that felt fairly personalized to me (bicycling and outdoor related) that I actually wondered if it was generated on the fly using an LLM.
FB knows me and what I like and they have enough of data on my searches that they could customize a pretty relevant audio ad that, now with LLMs, can feel really relevant and natural, especially with audio gen being so good.
My point though is I wasn't sure if it was LLM generated or not and that's stuck with me. Random ChatGPT copy-pasta is easy for me to pick out – most people do not write that well. But a sophisticated application of this tech probably approaches the it-could-go-either-way territory.
I genuinely loathe the over-familiar vibe you get from targeted ads in such a way where no matter how relevant to me the given product is, if you advertise it like that, I'm immediately suspicious of your intentions. If I'm talking about longboards a lot around my house and get ads for longboards, I would go so far as to say I would go out of my way to not buy any of the brands shown to me.
I think this is an underrated metric in terms of how advertisers are organizing their spend; the creep factor. If your first impression with a potential customer is creeping them out, how are the odds of them giving you a sale?
Just my 0.02.
I have a similar annoyance: the obvious ways marketeers try to get me in their funnel (I call it conversion aversion). It's hard to measure, so it's not taken into account by marketeers, but I'm quite certain the amount of people annoyed by conversion optimization tactics represent a lot of potentially lost sales.
By virtue of what I do, I interact with quite a few of our SDRs who do outbound calls all day long AND I am frequently on the receiving end of someone else's calls. It is a hard job. Attention is a very scarce commodity and the shotgunning of the LLM swill that has completely taken over the outbound has made it even scarcer.
A fun thing happened recently. At sales kick off I was having lunch in the mountain skiing and a few young SDRs joined me with their burritos. We were chatting and I got an inbound call from some random numberI picked up and sure enough it was an SDR from some random SaaS that's been trying and failing to reach me. I told that SDR, hey, you got me and 3 of your fellow SDRs here, take your best shot, you will be rated by people who do your job. Ha, he did pretty good! Our SDRs gave him a bunch of sh*t about not using the right call dialer management. It was a "closed lost" opportunity for them.
That's like the "is that your pitch?" scene from Boiler Room.
Whether it's crafted by AI or not, outbound is spam, and only scammy companies use it these days.
Every enterprise SaaS company with a sales team uses outbound.
Doesn't make it any less spammy/scammy
So you agree then?
Quod erat demonstrandum?
Somehow my personal phone number leaked into some database, and I get multiple SaaS calls per day. I welcome the day when it's all AI because I hate to be rude to real people but these sorts of calls almost force it.
I'm less hesitant to be rude to telemarketers anymore. Yes, they have a shitty job, yes, it's not their fault that your number is on their list. But it's a job they are choosing to do, knowing they are an integral part of the problem. Kind of like the "Contractors on the death star" ethical example.
If someone was paid to kick my puppy, I'm not going to just be OK with it because, "hey it's their job, and we're all struggling."
As soon as I notice they are reading from the script and aren’t the delivery person waiting with my package I just hang up immediately. No comment, I don’t even give them a chance to try to keep me on the line.
Being rude might be justifiable, but it still doesn't feel good.
> But it's a job they are choosing to do
Yes, low wage workers have so many wonderful opportunities to not get evicted or starve. Don't confuse middle-class and wealthy workers with poorer ones.
>I hate to be rude to real people
Just reminded yourself that they've chosen to remove themselves from the pool of 'real people' by participating scammy activities. They're the ones that have broken the social contract and treating them with respect just lets them continue to believe they aren't doing anything wrong.
Same thing happened to me. I probably get ten calls per day. I just don’t answer the phone any more unless I recognize the number. It’s very annoying. If I accidentally answer a spam call, most of the time I’ll just hang up. But I’m also very annoyed with telephone companies. Why isn’t there a “report spam” button for phone calls?
Wild take. Almost every single company of a certain size does outbound. Just like how almost every company sends endless marketing emails. Yeah its spammy. But it also converts some small percentage of users so they will continue to do it.
It's spammy. It isnt scammy.
How do you define "spam"?
To me, spam is unsolicited email or phone calls. People or organizations contacting me when I haven't requested they do so.
OK, was just curious. I only think of it as unsolicited mass email. If something's tailored to me or a call, I just think of it as part of doing business.
Spam is any communication the recipient doesn't want. The definition is by the recipient, not the initiator.
The term has moved to other forms of mass unsolicited advertising.
The first spams weren't email but Usenet (notably Cantor and Siegel's "Green Card" spam, which I remember, though that wasn't the first[1]).
We've now got email spam, Web spam, forum spam, SMS spam, phone spam, etc., etc., etc.
The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited.
Keep in mind that robocallers (which may have an automated or human at the other end) are dialing billions of numbers in the US per month[2].
Amongst other considerations: spammed networks die as those who find them intolerable defect from them. Phones (and Usenet, and email) were once exclusive, and hence, where intelligent and desired communications were to be found. As costs of utilisation and access fell, that is no longer the case. An instance of the Jevons Paradox as well as Gresham's Law: falling costs leads to increased use, falling barriers to participation makes bad usage drive out good. Direct-dial, universal-access telephony is teetering on the edge of death.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Brad Templeton has a history and etymology dating to at least 2001, which makes clear that the term arises from any unspecified "net abuse", with his first instance being in 1978. The phone system is itself a network. "Origin of the term "spam" to mean net abuse" <https://web.archive.org/web/20120716231643/http://www.temple...>.
2. See: "Phone Call Spam Statistics (2017 – 2024)" <https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/phone-...>, "How many spam phone calls do Americans receive?" <https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-spam-phone-calls-do-a...> (reported calls only), "Truecaller U.S. Spam Scorecard" <https://www.truecaller.com/us-spam-stats>. Two of the three report 3 billion+ spam calls per month. There are about 331 million mobile phone subscribers in the US (virtually one per person), which would mean over 100 spam calls per month. Some would suspect this is a severe underestimation.
How can this be true:
> Spam is any communication the recipient doesn't want. The definition is by the recipient, not the initiator.
If this is also true:
> The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited.
Say I send an unsolicited email by typing it to a businessperson I want to sell my product to. They get my email and didn’t want to receive it. But it wasn’t mass and it was unsolicited.
Was it spam?
I'll trust in your capacity to resolve any concerns with what I wrote.
Your hypo is utterly unrealistic in that it doesn't reflect reality, or what any business operating a marketing campaign would actually do.
But yes, it is spam.
> I'll trust in your capacity to resolve any concerns with what I wrote.
Yes, that is what I would do as well if I didn't want to answer a clear question.
> But yes, it is spam.
So then you retract this, "The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited." because the only requirement is that the recipient see it as spam?
There’s documented UCE from before, but Cantor and Siegel is regarded as the first sustained spam campaign. As for the term itself, it comes from the BBS era, referring to flooding a chat with the traditional Viking chant of “spam spam spam spam”
Attractive person walks up to you and asks you for your number - not spam.
Unattractive person walks up to you and asks you for your number - spam.
Company has a thing I need and calls me at the right time - not spam.
Company calls me up when I'm not looking to buy something - spam.
Ha, this is like the old recruiting joke where the manager drops half the resumes in the trash can and says “sorry, we only hire lucky people here.”
You’re right, of course, timing and fit are the things that work. I don’t think LLMs are going to magically solve either.
>How do you define "spam"?
You know the answer. Only assholes need clarification that unsolicited contact is spam.
I mean there's a legal definition of it. I personally don't think cold calling someone to make a sale is spam. The caveat being that if they tell me to not call again, I won't.
And LinkedIn messages don't bother me as long as they follow the rules of the site which don't prohibit cold outreach.
Strong disagree. My personal number has also leaked and I get 5-10 cold calls per day. They call during important work meetings. They call during dinner with my family. They call when I'm away on vacation. I will never, ever willingly buy any product from these calls.
Sounds like you need AI call screening.
Don't know when that will get here, but when it does (and better AI-powered spam filtering), I think a lot of these problems will disappear, and a lot of sales teams are going to have to rethink.
Google Fi has screening you can enable either for all unknown callers automatically or manually by tapping a button when the call pops up.
>I personally don't think cold calling someone to make a sale is spam.
You're wrong.
Based on what?
Based on the social contract that calling people unasked for to try and sell them stuff is unacceptable. Only assholes need this explained to them, normal people inherently understand it, the fact that you don't says something about your character or your intelligence.
> Based on the social contract that calling people unasked for to try and sell them stuff is unacceptable.
I may personally dislike it at times but that doesn't mean it's societally unacceptable in an objective way.
you're wrong, there is something broken in you that makes you unable to realize it.
For LinkedIn specifically, not only does it not prohibit cold outreach, but Sales Navigator, which is specifically set up to give you broader access to do cold outreach, is a major part of the product.
You're signing up to be sold to when you sign up to LinkedIn.
Right but there's a benefit to signing up as well. Or else you wouldn't be signing up at all.
Doesn't seem like a bad thing?
I didn't mean to imply it's a bad thing. I've bought things from people trying to sell to me on LinkedIn more than once.
Any communication that I did not opt-in for.
While the post has good points - you can't talk about this subject without defining what price points you're selling at.
A company will have radically different sales motions if they are selling a good/service costing:
Seems to me this post is probably targeting the top 1 (or 2) bullets/segments.You always make great points. For my comments, I was mainly thinking of the <$50k range where I've worked most. I did do a b2g startup that failed in part because the motions are fucking nuts jfc. So to your point: sales motions should differ dramatically based on price point. For enterprise deals ($500k+), strategic outbound still makes perfect sense, tho I'd argue you should prime the market first with a brand awareness campaign.
Thank you for narrowing your claims, you might want to update your post at the top of the thread to call out your ADV/ACV assumption.
I appreciate all the experience and advice you’re offering on this thread! Take my feedback as a nitpick: as I was reading through your top post, my initial thought was “this isn’t true all the time” because I spent 6 years in 2 separate startups with significant and successful outbound sales where our ADV > $100k.
One company stayed private and profitable while driving revenue north of $80M/yr; and the other company sold enough long-term enterprise contracts to be acquired by a bigger $B company.
Context is king.
radically different?
I mean, aside from being comfortable with longer sales cycles and taking the time to build more advocates on the enterprise side, I haven't seen a substantial difference across this spectrum (<1K is very different). All are best when the relationship-building is first and foremost.
I've always been a relationship seller. I agree that a lot of the AI hype surrounding outbound is going to be short lived. When everyone can do infinite outbound, no one will be able to break through. The AI arms race to get a slight edge on response rates is going to destroy that channel.
I've been working on https://humancrm.io to scratch my own itch. A CRM that helps me stay focused on relationships. I'm explicitly not adding any AI or automation to it.
Looks great, is it comparable to Monica [1] or is it more business oriented?
--
1: https://github.com/monicahq/monica
Thanks! HumanCRM is similar to Monica in its people focus (I also add my friends into HumanCRM), but is definitely more oriented towards professional networks. I'm also starting out with more focused feature set: emphasizes connecting with people rather than recording information.
So there is only a handful of primary entities: Humans, Leads, Deals, Communities (thus no Pets, Contacts, Tasks, Photos, Documents, etc).
I might expand it to capture more data in the future, but waiting to see what users make use of.
I’ve been looking for something to get better at my personal contacts. I’m not really on LinkedIn. Maybe I’ll get on just to try this, but reach out if I could try it some other way.
Thanks! I sent an invite to the email on your profile.
This resonates with me; I hope you're ahead of the curve and we see a time when there's a non-AI valuation multiplier for products & companies.
Thanks, I hope so too! I think by the end of the year sales AI disillusionment will really start set in and I'll have polished HumanCRM enough by then. All of the existing CRM players are going heavy into automation so this might stand out.
I would put a finer/pithier point on it:
The "attention economy" is out, the "trust economy" is in.
There is a job waiting for you at McKinsey.
> Eventually, humans are going to get used to the constant spam and start mentally tuning out these hyper personalized initiatives.
Maybe I just live in a bubble, but don’t most people already tune out ads and marketing emails while online?
People click ads in Google search results all the time.
Most people do that except in the rare instance where they find a product that really satisfies their needs. But farming those rare instances is precisely the goal of outbound marketing. You had a meeting just yesterday about how it'll take 9 months to staff up a team that can foobar your widgets, and sitting in your inbox there's an email from someone who says they can start foobaring your widgets next week. The same email went out to a bunch of people who already have a team or don't run widgets, but neither you nor the salesperson cares about them.
> You had a meeting just yesterday about how it'll take 9 months to staff up a team that can foobar your widgets
Who leaves that meeting and starts searching for a solution in their spam email?
The ads are kind of sneaky these days. It’ll be in the form of astroturfing, paying influencers to shill stuff, using bots to downvote negative reviews, etc.
AI good enough to pitch me but not good enough to read my email and alert me of products I should actually care about seems like the dystopian outcome ad-tech typically reaches.
I think for that to happen, you'd have to let a sophisticated AI read your emails, which maybe possible with the right home setup, but otherwise you're sending them to be read by a large corporation's.
Eventually, humans are going to get used to the constant spam and start mentally tuning out these hyper personalized initiatives.
haven't we already been doing this since email templating was a thing?
I have. Spam email is obvious from the subject line and the sender. Those messages get deleted unread. I very rarely am tricked into opening one.
Nice article, I hope we see the volume of spam and marketing reduce overall, but I wouldn’t bet on it even if it does become ineffective.
Just fyi, there are a few typos I noticed:
> where the accuracy and quality of the has improved tremendously at scale.
Missing a word. Maybe “content “?
> this is also going to cause a certain about of fatigue for the users and customers.
about -> amount
This is why the “Lean Startup” movement popular in early 2010s ultimately died: The market eventually got tired of every new startup being some vaporware product market fit test where a product wasn’t even fully built out because the founders wanted to push risk onto customers instead of going all in.
So now you have to do all the big things upfront and come to market with a fully polished professional offering to be taken seriously.
100% wrong.
why
From my perspective, as someone who is not good at marketing and sales, this is going to be positive because the playing field will have to focus more on product. Currently, I'm being out-competed by people who can sell well. A landing page with nothing behind it is out-competing my fully working product.
If outbound sales becomes ineffective, people will have more opportunities and time to think about their inherent needs, as opposed to being funneled into all their decisions by a salesperson.
It's frightening how much stuff people are buying that they don't need. While there exist stuff which they need that they don't know exists.
Can we skip to the part where unsolicited emails, calls, and texts go away? This sounds amazing.
I don't think messaging has improved - maybe on avg. but it's still clearly AI-generated.
The number of companies that "Elevate" services/quality/experiences... It's getting so sloppy.
But a lot of these points are recurring ones over the years, it's just like a rubber band that stretches.
At some point, CEOs will go on LinkedIn ...
"We loved the AI boom and it helped us improve a lot of our processes! But we need human connection, and that's irreplaceable - but now our differentiator is that we have humans reaching out to humans. AI will still be here as a sidekick."
> Having a good Twitter/social media presence will become a compulsory pre-condition. The company owned channels (like websites, email lists or apps) where you have direct access to customers will become key demand generation pipelines.
The ability to control their own media presence is what still makes me believe that ActivityPub has a future, but it depends on companies and marketers realizing that they need to be proactive about it; instead of just sitting on their hands and chasing the audiences wherever they think they are going.
I think that most marketers are aware that controlling your own mailing list is important; this is why so many of them post on every platform, have podcasts, and try to get you to sign up for their newsletter.
The issue with federated projects is that they lack the content to attract users and they lack the users to generate content.
> The issue with federated projects is that they lack the content to attract users and they lack the users to generate content.
This is why I wrote "it depends on companies and marketers realizing that they need to be proactive about it".
It costs next to nothing to set up a server and configure a bot that mirrors your twitter posts to the Fediverse. If they done just that, they'd be solving their end of the chicken-and-egg problem, and all they would need then is some patience and treat it as a Pascal Wager, where every round of "Here's something stupid that Musk did today" would be a change for them to convert the users to their preferred network, or to just maintain the status quo.
I think you’re overestimating how many of these promoters could figure out how to set up a server by themselves. Most of the ones who can will just stick with the proven technology (email).
I want the technology to work out, I just don’t see it happening anytime soon. Think of Linux and Firefox; both have been best in category products for years, but neither one has an appreciable market share.
> how many of these promoters could figure out how to set up a server by themselves
I am not talking about setting up a server by themselves. Managed hosting is a thing. People can get their own media presence without any technical expertise for less than $40/year. (https://communick.com/services/takahe) I am just talking about getting them being curious enough to find a service provider that can do it for them.
In the face of this AI-powered sales onslaught, customers will use AI-powered tools to analyze and evaluate all corporate products and services to make their purchasing decisions, without talking to anyone. Personal connections won’t be the solution to sales when customers trust their personal AI agents even more than real-life contacts.
It's already happening in HR and recruiting, but people still trust their network more. Their real network, not salespeople who sent a LinkedIn invite.
Fun fact: in my language (Polish) those AI generated voices are unbearable. I understand that this can improve making them indistinguishable from real person, but so far it all sounds to us like a fake person from temu.
> While I think these AI powered sales products are going to perform very well in the short run, this is also going to cause a certain about of fatigue for the users and customers.
I mean, speaking for myself, the fatigue is real and it’s been here for years.
I don’t think LLM content is going to make cold emails seem any warmer. I’ve never opened one and thought “if only this high-volume automated text were slightly more personalized.”
That said, I keep getting them. Seems like nothing can kill outbound, and I doubt LLMs will either.
> With LLMs, the messages and content have gotten to a point where the accuracy and quality of the __?????__ has improved tremendously at scale.
Doesn't everybody on here have filters good enough to route all "outbound" to spam?
everyone blasting ai-generated posts, bots, and videos is slowly making real people invisible.
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