[victorstanciu]

Hey man, I believe most of us here know how hard it is to bootstrap something and lift it off the ground. From my side, I admire your product, and I admire the hell out of the fact that you've open sourced it. Which is why I would have totally been fine with just the first email, but the second one pushed it from "start-up founder struggling to get momentum" to "spammer that won't leave me alone". You were just too aggressive about it, but I do think the way you're handling it now is great.

There's one thing I'm honestly curious of, because I've seen this technique before, and it's not necessarily a question to you, but to anyone who might read this: do these pretend-personal emails actually work on anyone? Your product is targeted at users with a pretty high technical skillset, do you think they really believe you hand-wrote that email? Because I could smell the automation right away, even before I checked the message source and saw the HTML structure and the tracking image. It's fake, it feels fake, and to me it's actually worse than an openly-automated message, because it insults me by assuming I can't tell it's not sent by a human. I think perhaps tactics like these work better on less-technical people (though they still shouldn't be employed at all!)

[dvtrn]

Talked about this on another community, here’s a hilariously sad example of these fake “personal” emails

I was once gone from home for two days traveling with family. Two days. HBOMax sent me an email with this exact subject line (edit: I went and checked through my past emails before unsubscribing, they sent four emails with the subject line over the holidays):

“I can’t help but wonder why you aren’t watching” as an attempt to inform me about the latest series that was now on the platform.

Why? Because I have a life HBO that doesn’t involve you lol. I do other things with my time. I’m not addicted to television. Like come the hell on. I’m already a paying customer. Get out of here with this “why aren’t you wasting more of your time on our platform?” BS

I feel genuinely bad for whoever had to write that, and worse for whoever thought it was a good subject line for ad copy.

[bombcar]

Those types of emails are usually a reminder to me to cancel whatever it is they're bitching about.

[ajdude]

I used to order monthly coffee nespresso pods from a small-time online store. One time I put the items in the cart and then stepped away from the computer for a short bit only to return to an email with the subject line "Looks like you’ve forgotten something!" displaying the items in my shopping cart. I haven't ordered another thing since.

[bombcar]

I can see how those ones may be effective, but they need to give me a coupon at the same time ...

[dvtrn]

If I were the only person using it, yeah probably. As it is, with a household of other users, it’s staying for now but I still really enjoy thoroughly mocking HBO for it whenever the chance allows.

At least the emails are no more.

[m3047]

There's a fine line between "you aren't using the product you paid for" and "we want to make noises about the choices you're making". Blurring that line doesn't help anybody, false pretenses makes it worse (because "oh they were just hustling, they aren't really surveilling your viewing habits").

[mrskitch]

Thanks for that -- we did have quite a few good conversations over emails. I did read each personally and respond to them. Didn't justify the means.

[88913527]

Could have been resolved with a "unsubscribe from this email" link included on the first email.