Cold Email and Spam | za-zu

On its own, a good product does nothing. If the world’s best piece of software were sitting on the personal computer of a hobbyist engineer, nobody would ever know about it, and it would be useless. And so, if you have created a great product, you need to tell people. You need to market your product.

Today there are hundreds of ways to grow a company: you could advertise on social media, or on Google. You could pay influencers. You could cold call, or knock on doors. You could send cold emails. You could post valuable content online and have people organically reach out (which is how we started marketing).

Every single one of these tactics is going to annoy some people. It is going to inconvenience them. It is, for a small moment, going to make their experience just a little bit worse. It is fun to fantasize about a world where people only hear about products that they are guaranteed to love—where every marketing campaign has a one hundred percent conversion rate. But that is, at least today, impossible.

People are going to be interrupted scrolling Instagram by an ad they didn’t want to see. Their sports game is going to take a break so they can be sold to. They might wake up to an email from a stranger trying to sell them something. It is true that one of the unfortunate facts about marketing—and thus growing companies, and creating value, and creating jobs, and improving society, and so on—is that you are going to minorly inconvenience some people to deliver lots of value to others. This is the reality of marketing.

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