Flirting with the spammy side

It’s fair to say we’ve never been particularly good at “growth” here at Team Tito.

Growth, that is, from the economic perspective: revenue, revenue, revenue, money, money, money.

I feel like I’ve grown a lot as a person in the last ten years, but the bottom line doesn’t care about that.

There are lots of ways to attempt to pursue increasing revenue: writing blog posts and sharing them to attract folks, try to put remarkable features into your product so that folks talk about it, curate personal networks and ask folks you trust to help, or: cold outreach.

Cold outreach can be effective, which is why every other day, a message from a person you never heard of likely ends up in your inbox. And in general, if something “works”, people will keep doing it. It’s really annoying.

The problem with “it works” is that it leads to “everyone is doing it”, and the problem with “everyone is doing it” leads otherwise ethically-minded folks to walk into scenarios where they unwittingly cross their own lines for acceptable marketing behaviour.

(enter me)

I’m not gung-ho on creating what folks call hypergrowth for Tito. That said, I do have my ambitions. In business terms, revenue is a metric of health, and increased revenue can lead to an increase in profits and thereby create independence and optionality. Money matters!

And so, when I spotted a customer using Tito that didn’t look like most of our other customers, I naturally thought “I should email more folks like this and tell them that Tito exists!”. I researched a whole bunch of “lookalikes” and crafted an email in my own style: personal, referencing the customer, and letting them know about our pricing.

Within 10 minutes of sending the outreach, I had an email from the reference customer, who had been told their name had been used. It was polite, but matter of fact: “Please stop sending spam”.

My initial reaction was shock. Me? Sending spam? But, but, but it was from my personal account. It had a friendly note. It had a discount!

And then I realised it: I was emailing folks, marketing my company’s services, without their consent, sending the same message to a bunch of people at once.

It was spam.

I was horrified at myself, and immediately stopped in my tracks. I’ve held off doing any kind of outreach based marketing for years because of stuff like this. And yet, somehow, because of the way “everyone does it” and because I somehow felt I was making it personal, I felt I was exempted from taking the care to build relationships based on trust. I was the really annoying guy.

There are loads of ways to reach potential customers that don’t involve sending a message to someone who has never given you permission to contact them by email. To do it in a high-trust way requires care, attention-to-detail, and a bit of effort. Unfortunately for me, those eluded me that day, and the consequence is a reduction of trust with the original customer.

We’ve decided to resume our implicit “no cold outreach” policy with an explicit policy that sets the bounds of the kind of outreach we will do to potential customers. We’re eager to tell our story and have our products—which we think are great!—find the folks who will find them valuable.

But not spam.