[teyc]

Listen to Andrew Warner's interview. Peldi talked about approaching people on twitter due early days to try to do sales. He wasn't very successful with the approach, and then went on to try something else.

    I'm fairly certain that this is
    a company I don't want to ever do business with.

That's the respectable side of you talking. If you have a house on the line in your own start up, you'll be crazy not to do everything to give your startup every chance of success.

On a personal level, I loath getting spam as much as everybody else, so please don't spam me!

[ericd]

Oh interesting, hadn't heard that part of the story.

I don't know about that - my thinking is that if blackhat is the only way to get something to succeed, It's probably not a very good idea anyway, and I'm probably better off spending my time doing something different.

[teyc]

The biggest risk to a startup is that people don't know about their product. Spamming is not a long term strategy, but it might be useful in finding the first few customers to get customer development kick started.

[wnight]

This seems like a bad attitude - that whatever sleazy thing people do is excused by them having over-spent their way to desperation.