
A competitor emailed me moments after I signed up to Stripe - ashdav
http://ashdavies.net/blog/2014/3/11/a-competitor-emailed-me-moments-after-i-signed-up-to-stripe
======
callmeed
For those that aren't aware, there is a growing class of lead-generation
startups which scrape websites and determine what services you're using.

My guess is that the company that contacted you is using one of these (Stripe
requires your public key in the head of your site and linking to their JS).
BuiltWith is one such service: [http://builtwith.com](http://builtwith.com)
... NerdyData & Datanyze also: [http://nerdydata.com](http://nerdydata.com),
[http://www.datanyze.com](http://www.datanyze.com)

Subscribers use these tools to find people who are trying out competing
services (they are not cheap, BTW). Often, if a site only recently added JS
code–for example, say, KissMetrics–you can assume they are still in the trial
period. That gives you a window of time to try and sell them on your competing
product. Or, if you sell a special WordPress plugin, you can use these
services to find WordPress sites.

Stripe doesn't have a trial period per se, but its pretty easy to switch
between the modern payment providers and if it was only recently installed,
its safe to assume you don't have a lot of customers yet.

~~~
adamseabrook
Based on the fact that he got the email 40 minutes after his query to Stripe I
doubt any of these companies were involved.

To do a crawl across a meaningful percentage of the Internet and refresh this
every 24 hours is hard enough even if you only capture the front page. Very
few sites include stripe.js in the source on the front page. So you would need
to crawl deep enough into a site to hit the checkout page and capture
stripe.js in the head section which is exponentially more difficult.

Indexing your crawl and passing this off to a team to extract contact details
and send it to a client so they can reach out all within 40 minutes I would
say is nearly impossible. It is possible they already had his details but I
cannot see anything on his site that would trigger a "likely to switch payment
gateways" alert.

My guess is this was completely random. A good sales rep will make 60-100
outbound calls per day along with a bunch of emails. Multiply this by the
number of outbound sales reps in the payments market and you have a lot of
sales activity.

------
mixedbit
Can this be explained with a birthday paradox? If there is a large number of
people signing up to Stripe and a large number of people receiving spam emails
from Stripe competitors, probability that some people will receive a spam
email just after signing up to Stripe may be non-negligible.

~~~
aaron695
I'd guess it's more to do with the OP is in a job that gets targeted with
these types of ads. (Correctly it seems)

Combined with, there probably has been other emails previously but they were
ignored since OP at that time had their head on different issues.

As a human a pattern was looked for and a pattern was found.

As above companies are tracking this sort of stuff and some sites get the
email addresses of user who visit (from tracking data). So the 'coincidence'
might be more contrived with a bit more targeting than just low level job
data. Would need more info.

But I wouldn't call it a birthday paradox, it's not totally random.

------
gabemart
I confess I've been trying a similar kind of thing attempting to promote a
website of mine. I find people who've written about competitors and email them
inviting them to try my site and asking for their thoughts. Is this scummy or
is it acceptable? I'm hoping it's different because the pertinent material is
public, rather than private like in the OP's case.

\---

Edit: I think in retrospect watty has a point, I've removed the links. I also
didn't expect this comment to rise to the top, and it is kind of off-topic.
Apologies.

~~~
watty
This is completely different. I think you knew that but saw this as an
opportunity to (further) promote asoftmurmer.

~~~
gabemart
I suppose the problem with this sort of thing is that it's turtles all the way
down.

------
nodata
A competitor didn't e-mail me moments after I signed up for Stripe. It's
coincidence.

~~~
bryan_rasmussen
not necessarily. there's not enough context as to how they got to stripe.

Did they write the url in the address bar of the browser without any other
context, or did they do something that signalled what they were going to do.

I bet #2.

------
davemel37
Ironically, I found this on BlueSnap's website...

[http://www.bluesnap.com/ecommerce/legal/prohibitions-and-
dmc...](http://www.bluesnap.com/ecommerce/legal/prohibitions-and-dmca/spam-
notification)

BlueSnap does not allow the use of any BlueSnap links and products in any type
of spam activity. If you believe that a BlueSnap link was used in spam
activity please submit a report to spam@bluesnap.com and include the relevant
link/s and message/s.

Merchants and Affiliates are requested to review our guidelines on avoiding
spam to help stay on the right side of the relevant legislation.

~~~
Grue3
It seems clear that Stripe emailed the OP to undermine the competitor. They
are the only ones to have his e-mail adress.

~~~
jggonz
Or someone within Stripe, with access to the user-sign up list, is an
affiliate with BlueSnap and is trying to make some extra money on the side.

An evil thought, and I'm fairly sure it isn't the case, but totally possible.

~~~
lauradhamilton
Sounds like a good way to end up in jail.

~~~
dreamdu5t
Jail? For what? Currently I have access to personal information for thousands
of customers for the company I work for. I've never signed an employment
contract regarding this data.

There's nothing legally stopping me from publishing all of that data, or
selling it on the side. At least not to my knowledge.

Just think... there's at least one of someone like me at every service you use
on the Internet.

~~~
curiouscats
I would hope that is not true in the USA, but maybe you are right (depending
on what you mean - I doubt you can publish SSNs and claim you had the right to
do so).

I seriously doubt that publishing people's private info you got from your
company would be legal based on European privacy laws (regardless what your
company chose to have you personally sign).

I imagine going to jail is unlikely in any case. And I doubt it would be
connected to your employment contract in any case: jail would likely be the
result of some criminal offense you committed against the state, not against
your employer.

------
ChuckMcM
I too suspect it is coincidence but two questions to add to my database, one
are you using the Chrome browser, and regardless of browser do you have any
extensions that help you 'fill in forms' ?

~~~
ashdav
Yes to Chrome, no to form fillers.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Thanks, the reason I ask is that there have been a couple of articles lately
on how much form data Chrome stores. (a somewhat rabid piece is here:
[http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/10/10/google-c...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/10/10/google-
chromes-cache-makes-data-easy-to-steal/2961739/)) I keep wondering if that is
an actual threat or not and if so how we could detect it.

~~~
mbesto
See callmeed's comment above. Most likely that's the source.

------
arb99
As sanswork said have you asked them where they got your details from? It
could just be a coincidence.

Or, when you said you 'played around with the [stripe] service' did you put
any stripe code on public sites?

~~~
ashdav
Waiting for their answer now. Haven't posted any stripe code publicly. Could
be a very good coincidence.

~~~
robmcm
> Could be a very good coincidence

Literally the last two times I have text my wife suggesting pizza for dinner I
have had an advertisement SMS from Dominos moments later. If it wasn't for the
shocking state of Dominos tech (website and mobile app) I would think they had
some crazy surveillance going on!

~~~
lewispollard
Some kind of pavlov's dog response? IE Dominos sends SMS marketing on a
roughly predictable timetable, and on a couple of days those messages arrived
late, causing you to subconsciously anticipate pizza news and suggest getting
pizza?

Probably not, I'm talking out of my ass.

~~~
sciguy77
Seems possible actually. Wasn't there just something yesterday on Dominos
using pizza-smelling ink on DVDs? The DVD would heat up in the player and
produce a pizza smell, inspiring hunger and hopefully a trip to Dominos.
That's pretty dastardly. Timing advertisements seems to be much more in the
realm of possibility.

------
thesis
I bought medicine online one time. Moments later I received an email to
purchase Viagra. Coincidence?

------
mendozao
I had a similar experience with spotify/rdio. I personally don't think these
emails are a coincidence

[http://creativaldo.tumblr.com/post/73662726109/is-spotify-
sp...](http://creativaldo.tumblr.com/post/73662726109/is-spotify-spying-on-my-
rdio-activity)

------
andrelaszlo
I think this is a clever marketing scheme by Stripe. Now hundreds of HN
readers will sign up just to check if they get an email from BlueSnap. I know
I did.

~~~
pc
We'd never betray the trust of our users by doing something crazy like that.
We're as puzzled as the OP.

~~~
yaur
Hmm, I know that when we bought an email list for our target demo we ended up
with a couple of honeypot addresses and an e-mail from the source asking who
got the list from, complete with legal threats if we didn't assist in their
investigation. This is cheap enough that if you have concerns about insiders
you might want to set something like that up.

------
joshdance
Did you put any of the code on a site? There are services that will scan sites
for snippets of competitors code and alert a company when someone is trying
their service.

~~~
ashdav
Nope, just signed up and left.

------
davemel37
this title is misleading. 40 minutes is a very long time, hardly "moments
after."

Considering the fact that I get about 3 postcards a week pushing merchant
services and credit card processing, I think this is just a coincidence.

As a marketer, especially in the fast paced online world, if I had the ability
to pull this strategy off, I wouldn't wait 40 minutes. I would pull the
trigger instantly, and since it is spammy as it is, I would use a much more
aggressive sell. (not that I would ever do this... I wouldn't!)

I see Blue Snap is running marketo on their site, so they clearly are doing
marketing automation, and if they are at all sophisticated, they probably have
some pretty advanced ways of deciding who to email, when.

------
jusben1369
For what it's worth that marketing message assumes you are already in
production with someone else and transacting actively: "I do understand you
may feel as though you are all set in this area" Rather than win your entire
business away they want you to start using them for _some_ payments. If they
thought you were actively looking to add a PG for the first time (ie somehow
knew you'd just signed up for Stripe) it would be different messaging. So I
think you may have signed up with them in the past a ways back and they think
of you as an already processing site with a gateway.

------
ttty
I've seen a startup here on HN that was doing exactly this thing. Would warn
you when a client signed up on a competitor site. I think the data was leaked
from some kind of analytics app.

~~~
seeingfurther
I remember that too... do you remember the name?

EDIT: Found it here: [http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/20/this-startup-tells-
you-whe...](http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/20/this-startup-tells-you-when-
companies-try-your-competitors-software-and-is-growing-25-a-month/)

It's [http://www.datanyze.com/](http://www.datanyze.com/)

~~~
teleclimber
That would require that the OP put some code related to stripe on his site.
He's said had not done that when he got the email.

"Every day, the company crawls millions of websites with its custom spider
technology, searching for hints about what software each company is using..."

------
Zikes
The lack of "Me too!" responses leads me to believe this is just a
coincidence.

------
northband
Curious how an article like this makes it to the #1 spot.

~~~
danvoell
Probably a lot of people who watched The Good Wife last night and/or privacy
conspiracy theorists.

------
instakill
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity)

~~~
ganeumann
_A lot of people don 't realize what's really going on. They view life as a
bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don't realize that there's
this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. Give you an
example, show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate of
shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate of
shrimp" out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either.
It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness._

\- Repo Man

------
sanswork
I've not experienced this myself. But have you asked them where they got your
contact info from? I'd be curious to know because any possibility I can think
of (outside of you posting on twitter or your blog, etc) would be extremely
questionable.

~~~
ashdav
I've asked them, the person emailing has said they received it from a
marketing department. Pushing for more info now.

I'm thinking really hard about this and I can't find anything I've shared that
suggests I'm looking for a new payment gateway. Hence the post :)

~~~
jlebrech
you might have put your email address into a banner for some reason and when
you started searching for payment gateways it passed your details on?

------
Bill_Dimm
That is creepy. I'm not sure whether the publicity from the blog post is going
to generate more or fewer customers for the Stripe competitor, though.

------
headgasket
I've had this happen to me on different topics (IIRC it did happen with Stripe
a month or two ago) way too often to attribute it to coincidence. My working
assumption is that online privacy does not exist anymore.

With all these microphones and cameras attached to all the net enabled devices
we use, it's a matter of time before offline privacy stops existing as well.

Email in 1985 must have felt weird too. Cheers, F

------
throwaway13qf85
Without any other evidence you can't conclude that this is anything other than
a coincidence.

------
jamesbrownuhh
Personally I would want to see some kind of smoking gun like "A competitor
emailed me AT THE UNIQUE EMAIL ADDRESS THAT I JUST SIGNED UP TO STRIPE WITH"
\- otherwise the mail could have just been a coincidence and could have come
from anywhere.

------
flatline
It is possible that Stripe divulges your contact info to some affiliate that
has been, well, infiltrated by the competition. I would be surprised if you
got any concrete info from the competitor, either way.

------
lnanek2
If I search for JSP hosting, I see ads for it all over after. Not surprising
if his searches and browsing triggered some marketing system that managed to
email him.

~~~
hellweaver666
It's called re-marketing - the site you look at allows the ad network to track
your visit to your site, then they show you ads for that site as you navigate
the web. It's horrible but incredibly effective.

~~~
rhizome
Retargeting.

------
ramoq
Oddly enough, this happened with me and Mixpanel the other day. I signed up
for Mixpanel, and just a few hours later got a cold email from someone at RJ
Metrics

------
ChrisArchitect
without further info I would guess this is remarketing in effect......if this
person visited that competitor previously and they have remarketing system in
place with google adwords or whatever...and have it set to track you to stripe
then they know you're actively in the market and send a cold email..... this
kind of adwords remarketing has only started to get mainstream more recently
I'd say...

~~~
dangrossman
Remarketing works by adding a snippet of code to your own site to put a cookie
on the visitor's browser, then the display network checking for that cookie
and displaying your ad if it's present. It's not possible to remarket to
another site's users, even underhandedly with the assistance of the company
that drops these cookies, as stripe.com hasn't tagged their own site with any
of those companies' code.

------
joelhooks
ad retargeting, or "stalker advertising". Cookie or whatever tracks movements,
monitors for specific urls. When tagged client visits urls, system recognizes
paying customers and sends "friendly heads up" email.

------
johnchristopher
Off-topic: which blog engine is this ?

(I tried ctrl-s :)

(Because nice typo)

~~~
itake
[http://www.squarespace.com/](http://www.squarespace.com/)

------
heidijavi
this is possible through datanyze, if I'm not wrong

