[HN Gopher] Cold emails and Twitter (2018)
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Cold emails and Twitter (2018)
Author : herbertl
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-07-24 06:59 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (guzey.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (guzey.com)
| chrisma0 wrote:
| Especially in the research space, I really recommend Twitter. In
| Software Engineering many really interesting researchers and
| practitioners tend to share their experiences there. In my
| experience it's a great way to virtually meet others who you
| would probably otherwise never encounter.
|
| Heard of "Scrum"? Follow Jeff Sutherland
| (https://twitter.com/jeffsutherland). Like Conway's Law? Follow
| Melvin Conway (https://twitter.com/conways_law).
| tlogan wrote:
| Twitter is used small and quite homogenous pct of population.
| So you might not get a good advice on the Twitter.
|
| Email is great.
|
| My personal experience is that I did not get a good feedback
| this way. But the feedback from paying customers is gold:
| honest and clear .
| tuxie_ wrote:
| For me the novelty wears out the moment you start seeing these
| people's family pictures or political commentary. Even if I
| agree with them, I don't care about it, it's not why I follow
| them, it's just noise for me.
|
| I'm not saying they should not post such content, don't get me
| wrong. It's just that Twitter becomes a distraction, your list
| requires constant maintenance, and the noise to signal ratio is
| not worth it for me.
| dandellion wrote:
| I've tried Twitter a few times and I always leave this exact
| reason. I wish there was some more filtering or tagging
| options... so I could subscribe to @someone#research or
| @other#hobbies, and avoid all the noise. Some people have
| dedicated accounts, but it seemed to be a minority, I wish it
| was more common.
| biggu wrote:
| This. Having sub-channels in social media is long overdue.
| It will be a killer feature. If I want to post baby photos
| I can freely spam the "family" subchannel who will be more
| than happy to consume it. Similarly we can cater to a
| different set of followers with tech posts
| synu wrote:
| I just unfollow anyone who does that. There are quite a lot
| of people who just stay "on topic", more than enough to fill
| a feed. So while I might miss some interesting content from
| people I otherwise unfollow, it turns out a lot of the time
| someone else retweets it anyway.
|
| Unfollowing itself when you see something off topic takes
| very little time.
|
| I do agree with the other reply that being able to subscribe
| to topics from people would be awesome, but in the meantime
| it's pretty good if you maintain a zero tolerance policy for
| off topic stuff.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| "Warm" emails are less scary: meet someone you want to work with,
| talk about their problem, and promise to follow up on that thing.
| Then do so, and do so knowing the quality of your follow-up email
| is a reflection on the quality of you a a potential collaborator.
| Find a way to offer a bit of value, while also showing the
| quality of your writing, especially your brevity.
| TekMol wrote:
| I'm currently working on a software solution that will wipe out
| the need for human labor in a certain industry.
|
| I wonder if I should just build it, put it online with a "Buy"
| button and a statement "Here you can get the same as from the
| competition, but 10x cheaper". Then I would have to do marketing
| for it.
|
| Or should I reach out to some of the companies who already have
| the customers and currently fill the demand via human labor? And
| see if they want to outsource their work to me for 1/10 of the
| price? Even if they don't want to do business with me, I could
| probably learn a lot from them about the industry.
|
| But somehow, I'm a bit afraid the companies will hate me and the
| conversations will become unpleasant. I have nightmares of them
| sending a contract killer after me, lol!
| Jasper_ wrote:
| > I'm currently working on a software solution that will wipe
| out the need for human labor in a certain industry.
|
| lmao, when has this ever been true.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I don't see a lot of telephone switchboard operators, do you?
| leobg wrote:
| Have you already validated it with real customers? Most likely
| there are still problems that need to be ironed out.
| TekMol wrote:
| That will indeed be interesting.
|
| The industry is very cliquey.
|
| I talked to two people from the industry and showed them what
| the software can already do. They agreed that it is as good
| as what humans do. But both also said they would not become
| customers. Because they like to mingle with people and
| support them. One of them said that is also the reason they
| don't try to outsource the work to lower wage countries.
|
| But I only need 0.01% of the industry as customers to have a
| great lifestyle business. So I will plow ahead and see what
| happens.
|
| Plus, with a 10x decrease in costs, the industry might
| actually grow. There might be new customers coming in that
| previously were not interested due to price.
|
| Think robotaxis: Not only would a robotaxi service get
| existing customers of old school taxis and Uber. They could
| offer a lower price and have people take a robotaxi who would
| otherwise have walked or stayed at home.
| leobg wrote:
| Can you not provide your service directly to the consumer?
| TekMol wrote:
| No, it's a B2B thing. Consumers don't pay for it.
|
| Think robopilot software. It needs to be put into a plane
| before consumers can use it.
| leobg wrote:
| Can you then not provide it as a service to businesses,
| just slightly below the usual market price? Selling the
| fish instead of teaching then your new way of fishing.
| TekMol wrote:
| That is the plan. The "BUY" button would not be for
| buying the software, but for buying the service that they
| usually hire people for.
|
| It is not possible to "hide" the fact that it is done by
| software. As there are some differences. The software is
| stronger in some aspects of the tasks and weaker in other
| aspects. Overall, the software is superior. But it is
| noticeably different to work with the software than with
| a human.
|
| Think Robotaxis: Superhuman reaction time. Never sleepy.
| But bad at interpreting unusual situations. Overall, they
| will be 10x safer than human drivers at some point. But
| you will still notice if a human or a bot drives the car.
| leobg wrote:
| In the realm of NLP, there are some companies that offer
| a human in the loop service. So to the outside, they
| offer human quality results. And on the inside, they use
| their machine learning technology, supervised by humans.
| One way to do it, I guess, is to especially watch the
| results where the model is least confident. And of
| course, you feed back all of these corrections back into
| the model, so it becomes better over time.
| leobg wrote:
| And those objections you refer to, I am quite sure that
| people like journalists would've had the same objections
| to machine learning transcription services just a few
| years back. Now, of course, they all use otter.ai and the
| like and cannot imagine ever going back to slow human
| transcriptionists.
| TekMol wrote:
| Yes, good example.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Note, I haven't actually poked around to see what your idea is,
| I'm going off of solely this comment, but...in my experience,
| the thing you're worrying about is the last thing you need to
| worry about.
|
| Here's the thing that I find happens more. I 100% believe that
| your solution could be as good as you think it is, but you're
| STILL going to have a hell of a time convincing people of it,
| and weird, seemingly goofy barriers, are going to come up.
| "Self-evidently" good software/solutions mostly don't exist,
| even when they are that good.
| darkerside wrote:
| Based on your other post, you're in an industry that values
| relationships and trust. Sounds like the first strategy is a
| nonstarter. You'll need relationships to break in, which makes
| the latter your only choice, and probably means you continue to
| be a value added commodity. You won't own the relationship, at
| least, not without a LOT of work to learn the industry and its
| people.
|
| Total speculation, but do you have a strong understanding of
| what needs to happen when something goes wrong with the process
| you are automating? It's sometimes too easy to automate 99%,
| and think you've got it solved, when the last 1% is the actual
| hard part.
| baxtr wrote:
| Good stuff! Although I think the title is a bit misleading and
| should be adapted.
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