[throwawaygh]

Hackathons and conferences are good venues for advertising this particular product, and an email/slack message is not a completely unreasonable mechanism for doing so.

However,

1. Do it through official channels. If you want to advertise your product by mass emailing hackathon participants, then sponsor the hackathon.

2. If are not sponsoring, then at least limit your outreach to people who you actually talked to during the event. Have genuine conversations, tell them about your product during the conversation, and ask if they'd like a "tree trial of the pro membership" or whatever. Only follow-up if they are actually interested.

3. Most importantly, communicate professionally. That means a well-structured, concise, convincing, and error-free piece of text. It helps to list next steps. The message in the OP is, to be frank, a rambling mess of a narrative with middle school-level grammar errors. I would expect better written communication skills from a high schooler. Even if I met this person at the hackathon, and even if I solicited a followup, this email would probably still make me lose all interest.

[jlbnjmn]

Thanks, I think I understand your perspective better. It sounds like you care more about the lack of genuineness or professionalism than the act of reaching out and selling, if I'm understanding correctly.

I think the takeaway for me is to work in a space/field of genuine interest so that building relationships can be a genuine activity.

[throwawaygh]

No, it's exclusively the lack of profesionalism. Business is business. I don't want a "genuine" sales/marketing person. Your product is not my baby.

The right way to do this is to 1) sponsor the event and then 2) send out a professional email/flyer/whatever pitching the product through the official mechanism.

[bobbyz]

I also want to add that he emailed me under false pretences. He conjured up an imaginary world in which we were close friends and I cared about what he did at the hackathon and what he’s doing afterwards (I’ve never met the guy). He undoubtedly wanted me to believe that he handwrote this email for me alone when its a copy-paste marketing email that he’d reused many times.

Not only is it dishonest and wastes my time, the execution is so bad I feel embarrassed for the guy (really? You “arrived” at a virtual hackathon?)

Edit: Oh my god and I almost forgot. He sent this to me at 3:21 AM!

[nathanganser]

Hey bobbyz!

I'm really surprised that this is taking so much of your mental energy :/ I remember you wrote quite an aggressive message on the Hackathon Slack that had to be removed by admins..

It seems like you took my email so much more serious that you should have!

I definitely didn't want you to feel like I was faking a friendship, this was a cold outreach done because I believed that this could add value to you.

But it's just cold emailing. I didn't mass email people without a reason :) You met people, you might not want to lose touch, that's it.

But agreed - totally a grey area - I'm not complaining, I should of course expect such reactions!

[bobbyz]

Grey area? Don't you mean technically illegal in the sender, receiver, and slack's jurisdiction?

(https://www.fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/eng/00013.html)

(https://www.google.com/search?q=switzerland+spam+laws&oq=swi...)

[nathanganser]

Cool feedback! Yeah I'd probably do it that way if I was to do it again :)