
Tell HN: LocBox is spamming HN users - jason_slack
I received this e-mail, seems companies/people think it is acceptable to SPAM fellow HN users and have us not care..<p>Hi there - my name is Saumil Mehta and I'm Founder at LocBox (http://www.getlocbox.com) and formerly a Software Engineer focused on web search (Kosmix) and public-key crypto (Voltage Security). I saw your submissions on Hacker News and decided to reach out; thank you in advance for reading my unsolicited note.<p>My company focuses on empowering local businesses to have the same Marketing tools as larger retailers - specifically, we help automate customer acquisition and retention (revenue + foot traffic) for these businesses. We work with hundreds of paying customers that love our approach and we just raised a large Series A funding round with Google Ventures and others.<p>Would you be interested in working with us or advising us (with your referrals)? We're doing meaningful work and want to work with other great people. I've worked with great engineers in the past but these days it's easier to run into Bigfoot :)<p>Would you be up for a quick phone or Skype chat to discuss?<p>Best,
Saumil
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dangrossman
I don't like this submission at all. It IS acceptable to reach out to people
on HN, and other communities like it, to see if you can work together or their
startup can help you out. I love getting mails like that, especially from a 2+
year old member that is asking for advice or a chat, along with introducing
what he's working on.

Presumably that's why you have an e-mail in your profile when there's nothing
compelling you to share that. That someone actually used that e-mail should
not result in public defamation and linking their business name with spam.
Networking is something lots of professionals do -- and you can opt out by
simply not giving out your e-mail, or saying so in your profile.

Now we can see that he also sent the same mail to some other people. That's
much less 'cool', and I agree that businesses shouldn't harvest profile
e-mails just to market to us. But you gave no indication you knew that when
you came here to call it spam -- and you should really be sure before making
serious claims that could have ramifications for his company for years. This
submission is gonna be in search engines forever with his company name and his
target keywords in it.

~~~
semanticist
I got this same message several days ago, and I assumed it had been mass-sent,
based on the fact that my name wasn't mentioned anywhere in the message body
and the phrasing was extremely generic.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that jason_slack would come to the
same conclusion as I did, and claiming this is 'defamation' is absurd and
baiting, especially given that you'd seen confirmation it HAD been sent to
multiple users when you wrote this.

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famousactress
That's sad. I got the same email (word for word to my eyes), and while I don't
mind at all when people email me via HN it's pretty obnoxious that I spent 10
minutes out of my day writing a pleasant and thoughtful response to someone
who couldn't be bothered to do the same.

I hope this doesn't cause me to second guess the next email I get from an HN
user, since so far this is pretty aberrant in my experience and I've been
really delighted to be in touch with the (admittedly few) folks who've pinged
me this way.

~~~
hasenj
I also got the same email and spent some bit of time writing a (somewhat
thoughtful) reply but got nothing back. I assumed he didn't like my reply.

~~~
saumil07
Hello there - I've tried to respond to almost everyone that wrote back. If I
missed you I'll go back and check my drafts because sometimes I have
additional questions that I want to ask folks after taking a look at their
notes or their blog/website/github and don't want to piss away an oppty to
have a real conversation being trigger happy on responses.

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semanticist
I received this a few days ago, and only got around to replying this
afternoon, to quickly ask for more details.

It felt like a bulk-send to me when I first looked at it, too generic, with no
indicator of why they might want to work with me. If they're looking for
JavaScript guys I'm especially surprised they contacted me.

I definitely don't think this is cool - contacting someone you find via HN
because you have something relevant to discuss: that's actually awesome. Mass
sending the same generic message to anyone who lists an email address: that's
just spam.

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danso
I got that same message too, except that he made specific reference to how my
JavaScript related posts caught his eye. Since most of my JS posts are along
the lines of "can someone design some sort of training wheels framework for
Backbone?" I figured he was casting a wide net.

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saumil07
Hello all - my name is Saumil Mehta and since I guess I'm the mastermind
behind this whole thread it behooves me to reach out and respond.

First of all, I'm sorry to jason_slack for the major inconvenience caused by
my email. It was written by me, came from my work email account (saumil.mehta
AT getlocbox.com, in case you care to know), was sent 1-1 not en masse (you
can check the headers) and was in no way intended to get anyone ticked off.

Secondly, yes. I've emailed well over 100 people personally in the last 15
days. A bunch of the emails have had very similar body copy so that is also
accurate. I read Hacker News a decent bit and always search around for folks
doing frontend work by using the search box and if I like their
submissions/comments and sometimes if I just find their username intriguing or
entertaining I poke around for their bio for their email and send them the
note you see above. I do it nights and weekends after my "day job".

Thirdly, I work at and run a venture-backed company in San Francisco. It's the
best job I've ever had and as everyone knows, learning from and working with
good folks is paramount. It is also challenging to connect w/ the same folks.

With that backdrop set, I will admit freely that I like to ask for help. A
lot. I ask lots of people. I cold email a lot of people. I do it with
potential customers, potential partners, potential investors, potential folks
that might be interested in contracting w/ us or joining our team. I always do
it respectfully IMHO. Hell, I've even done it to Patrick Vlaskovits who was
kind enough to respond in my stead on this page (hey Patrick!).

The outreach I discuss above has actually been excellent. It has yielded lots
of fun conversations over email and Skype and several great phone and in-
person conversations with folks in the community. I used to be a (decent but
never great) developer. I love shooting the shit w/ other developers. A lot of
it goes nowhere because most folks are busy at their day jobs or startups or
are booked for contracts or don't care to work w/ us after talking w/ us. Some
of it has resulted in freelancing contracts that has really helped my startup.
That's all par for the course but a great investment of my time and
(hopefully) anyone that takes time out of their busy day to talk to me.

In case you care, the response rate that I tabulated manually in my Google
Apps account has been well north of 25%. That tells me that folks are,
generally speaking, happy to talk to me and that I'm not wasting their time or
trying to sell them timeshares.

I have had exactly 2 people tell me to go take a hike over email. That's ok
too. When it happens I always apologize for the inconvenience and move on. But
by and large the Hacker News community has been fantastic to connect with and
learn from.

Lastly, a philosophical point. We all know startups are hard and millions of
dollars of funding does nothing to change that. The only way to hack it after
being at it for 18 months, I've found, is to ask for help very proactively,
even of folks I don't know. It has stood me in great stead in every endeavor -
fundraising, contracts, partnerships, customers, office space leasing,
personal sanity maintenance, you name it. I hope you will agree and if you
don't, feel free to email me or call me at (415) 322-9308 and flame me over
the phone in the middle of my work day :)

Thanks all and good night!

~~~
jason_slack
Saumil,

Your e-mail to me was generic. Nothing personal. Cookie cutter, boilerplate,
etc.

I took it as SPAM and the last thing I am going to do is reply back to a
SPAMMER and confirm that my e-mail is real.

Most all of my HN submissions are my thoughts and opinions. Nothing really
technical. You say that you did read my submissions before contacting me.

Specifically tell me what about my submissions caused you to e-mail me?

~~~
saumil07
As I've said in the rather giant tome above I've done 100+ of these so forgive
me if it's not on the tip of my tongue. I went back and looked at your
submissions and it must have been the fact that you have a lot of Ask_HNs, a
couple about RoR but mostly about lots of interesting technology stuff. It's
hard to gauge anything after multiple conversations, much less from a
submission feed but I generally get along well w/ folks that ask a lot of
questions, are very curious and ask for help freely into various communities.

In this case, I was rather wrong :) well hell, can't win 'em all.

~~~
jason_slack
But HN is not a "Stack Overflow" style community. So if you have done 100+ of
these to HN users I dont think you get the point of this community.

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mattdeboard
I too received this email, more specifically about JavaScript. Obv tacky &
tasteless but probably working for him.

~~~
saumil07
Disagree with the tacky/tasteless part but yes, as I describe above, it did
indeed work for me. Thanks for your feedback.

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ollysb
Seems there are different views on this. Maybe you should add something to
your profile indicating if you want to receive unsolicited emails from
startups.

~~~
jason_slack
There surely are different views. It was this one being generic and exhibiting
SPAM like qualities that made me not happy.

If this reply had been personal.."Hey, this is what I liked about your HN
submissions and I think I could use your input, are you willing to provide
it..this is how you contact me if you want to.."

I might have formed a different conclusion.

~~~
saumil07
Fair enough, agree to disagree on this one. It's not as if you had just heard
from the next Nigerian prince or been offered cheap meds at a low price :)

I personally think a Tell HN with an accusatory tone is extreme - could have
checked headers, could have talked in private, could have ignored it, could
have edited your bio to flame me specifically, could have reported spam on
your email client, any number of things - but whatever floats your boat works
for me. I did reach out after all so you're free to do what you like in
return.

But as I've said earlier, sorry I inconvenienced you so much w/ my little
email. Have a great weekend!

~~~
mentat
There's no "agree to disagree" when he's telling you not only what made him
unhappy but what you could have done better. This reply just looks more like
you're the kind of person who doesn't pay attention.

~~~
jason_slack
Agreed, he made a mistake by spamming and rather than say flat out he made a
mistake, he is sugar coating his words to not admit it outright, save some
face.

I have more respect for someone that admits mistakes outright.

An apology has 3 parts: 1\. You say "I made a mistake" 2\. You apologize to
the person for the mistake 3\. You dont make the same mistake again

1\. I made a mistake 2\. I am very sorry that I did this to you 3\. I wont do
this again.

Someone who doesn't use a 3 step apology doesn't mean it to begin with.

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Jach
I also received the same email four days ago. I'm curious what tool they used
to harvest email addresses. I'm very behind-the-times in what harvesters
bother to implement these days, if they've gotten to the point of having a
regex match on /[emailchars]+.{,20}(gmail|yahoo|etc)/, then I'm impressed! If
there was any manual work involved though, it's sad that it went to waste on a
generic non-templatized email.

~~~
saumil07
That tool would be my very tired but somewhat functional human brain late at
night and on weekends. And as I describe above, it's not sad at all. It was
actually awesome to be able to speak with so many cool folks.

------
codegeek
One thing for sure. LocBox probably got a lot more attention now due to this
post. I did not get the email but this post made me take a look at LocBox :)

~~~
saumil07
Excellent! We try to empower local businesses with good software and we like
what we do - Local is super-challenging and very broken which in turn makes it
fun to try to build stuff for. Plus customers pay on Day One, which is always
nice.

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orangethirty
Now I'm jealous. I didn't get the email. Saumil, send it over. Let's talk.
Someone who is willing to do this campaigns is someone I want to get to know.

~~~
saumil07
Will do! Thanks man.

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vlaskovits
FWIW Saumil is good dude, doing good stuff.

Note to Saumil: use a "spinner" script next time buddy. ;)

~~~
ujeezy
The term "spinner script" was new to me; here's basically what it is:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning>

~~~
icewater
Thanks.

