

Ask HN: What's your stance on this method for poaching potential customers - sdesol

To make the long story short, my future competitor's issues are online.  That is, their bugs, feature request, etc. are viewable by all. And because of this, I can easily see what their customers/evaluators are saying about their product.  These customers/evaluators also make their e-mail address freely available.<p>The question that I pose to you is, how would you feel if somebody contacted you about a problem that you had raised?  Note before contacting the user, I would obviously have to believe that my product would be able to address the issues that they raised.<p>Would this be crossing the line or is this just how business is done?
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mahmud
Legal, fair and _ethical_. You're offering a potentially better product to
exactly the people that need it.

However, before you hawk your brand and wares, try to imagine yourself a good
Samaritan and introduce yourself. You might get more information about their
needs and wants than you can ever glean from a bug report. This stuff is
called Solution Selling and it's a more conversational approach to sales:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_selling>

N.B: the references in that page contain wacky commercial products. A better
sales advice might be "just be human and be honest". Commercial SS includes
variable pricing stuff you don't need.

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LeBlanc
Whatever you do, don't reference specific issues the customer had or
statements they made. Most people will find this very creepy and stay away
from your service. That said, you can tailor your pitch to whatever pain
points that customer has.

So "I saw that you have a problem with X at wonka corp" is a no-no, but "My
service is way better at X than wonka corp" should be fine. In general, keep
it general.

~~~
bigiain
How about "My service is way better at X than wonka corp, - also, we value our
customers privacy highly and wouldn't dream of publishing your email address
in a publicly available support forum."?

~~~
lsc
Well, for instance, if oracle contacted me 'cause i was on RedHat boards, I'd
find it pretty creepy and irritating, especially if they started going off
about redhat not respecting my privacy; I put my email on there myself. for
someone else to go and assume that I didn't actually mean to put up my email
would be kinda insulting.

But then, i'm not the sort of person who responds to sales solicitations. (In
fact, I do my very best to avoid buying products that require negotiating with
a salesperson- it's usually the mark of a higher price.) so you might not want
to listen to me.

However, if you are poaching from a semi-open-source support form, you might
want to keep what I say in mind.

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codingthewheel
Well allow me to be the lone dissenting opinion. (Edit: what follows should be
interpreted as a rant against this practice, not against you personally, or
your business idea :)

Harvesting user's emails from a 3rd-party site that you plan to compete
against is unequivocally and unambiguously a shitty, low, underhanded
practice. Not to put too fine a point on it.

You didn't put in the footwork or the dollars necessary to get those customers
yourself.

You didn't get the customer's permission to contact them (and NO, just because
a customer posts his email address in plainview does NOT mean he's implicitly
given you his permission.)

You didn't achieve a real and meaningful relationship with your customers or
your competitors.

You just harvested some emails that were left in plainview, no different than
any other 2nd-rate spammer on the net.

Ethics aside, any business that depends on the glomming of email
addresses/discussions from 3rd-party competitors is...the best word I can find
is "uninspired". If you don't have a problem with this business model, you
don't have a problem with targeted spam.

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fookyong
I think it's fair game. However, instead of building a feature and then
pitching it directly to the user, I would create a landing page for it.

Something clearly laid out e.g. "(big text) Having Problems with X? ->
describe the pain-point feature -> describe the app -> pricing / call to
action"

This is better for a few reasons, I think:

1) It's less in-your-face. You don't want to be a sales douchebag and make the
customer feel obligated to use your app because you've solved a competitor's
pain-point. So instead of direct emailing them the pitch, you say "hey our app
solves this problem - here's a page explaining why."

2) It's scalable, since you can just send other people to the same page
without having to pitch them all the time. You could even set up some adwords
campaigns for the specific phrase "XYZ app with ABC feature" and see what
happens. You never know - people might be googling for a solution.

3) It's less creepy as it implies that the feature was built for the benefit
of everyone (which it was) rather than the few customers that you've stalked
:)

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spooneybarger
If the information is freely available then I don't see that as ethically
wrong. It is like being in a bar and overhearing someone who has an issue with
your competitor and approaching them.

~~~
stretchwithme
Not an ethical problem. But I wonder if the customers might feel a bit spied
upon. I would keep the communication generic, wouldn't mention how you got
their address and not refer to just the problem that they mentioned.

~~~
flashgordon
Actually I would have thought the customer (after getting over being spied on)
would have felt angry at Wonka corp for making it so easy for other parties to
track them. That could be something you could capitalise on without being
obvious :D.

~~~
user24
Many people don't think like that; if your house gets broken into, you don't
generally complain to the locksmith who fitted cheap locks.

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ohashi
I say try it and see what happens. See what works, what doesn't, customize
each contact and improve based on results.

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postfuturist
I contribute bug reports to open source projects. If somebody contacted me
through contact information leaked in a place like that about a 'competing
product', I would be angry and probably blog about it. Fortunately, nobody
reads my blog. Unfortunately, it is indexed by Google.

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staunch
I believe you're 100% in the clear ethically.

