[jasode]

>But against my better judgment, in an attempt to replicate that first sale, I sent out maybe 800 emails over the span of a few weeks to potentially relevant startups and app development companies (targeted via Apollo.io),

Never heard of Apollo.io before so I went to their web landing page https://www.apollo.io which touts : "Search, engage and convert over 250 million contacts at over 60 million companies with Apollo’s sales intelligence and engagement platform."

That type of text would seem to set off all sorts of alarm bells about the service: "Hey wait a sec... how'd they get all those business contact email addresses? They couldn't possibly get 250 million people to willingly submit contact information for marketing?!?"

And some googling around does confirm that they're a data broker that scrapes sites like LinkedIn for contact information without people knowing about it. One google result was a HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23955944

The point of all the above is.... I can't see how sending any bulk marketing emails to a list gathered in a secretive and hostile way would be good for your startup product. Wouldn't many (most?) recipients wonder "How'd you get my email address?" which would poison whatever product you're trying to sell?

Does anyone have any legitimate success stories from using Apollo.io the way op tried?

++EDIT to be more specific about the scenario: an entrepreneur with a programming dev tool like https://www.molecule.dev/ that sent a bunch of cold emails via Apollo.io and got new customers. The target demographic of buyers for developer tools seems like the most hostile to reach via cold emails like that.

Does Apollo.io even reveal the actual email addresses to you ? Or do they only forward your marketing message?

[bombcar]

There are many many of these and people use them all the time; most people at the levels they're being hit don't have time to wonder how you got their address (and for many, many companies it can be as simple as guessing their address format from other available ones, something like first.last@company is pretty easy to work out).

And if these people ever go to a conference, they likely hand out business cards with their info on them.

[notahacker]

When it comes to scraped data it's usually even simpler: the scrapers got the email address from the website which lists their email address as the tech/marketing/sales/hr contact for their company, which is out there because sometimes people need to approach them with things which are legitimately relevant and of interest

Always mildly amusing when you get a pitch which refers to your website by someone that obviously hasn't visited it though...

[analogj]

Yeah, data brokers are awful and their business model is an abuse of the ideals of the internet imo.

I’ve been working on a tool to automate GDPR & CCPA deletion requests to data brokers - basically it’s a database of ~650 registered data brokers + email templates written in legalese. After the user provides some basic contact information, it does a simple mail merge.

https://github.com/AnalogJ/justvanish

Still a WIP