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Because of this post, CEOs around the world are receiving 3x emails today. Haha, just kidding. It's actually the opposite. The reason CEOs respond is because t
by vortico 8y ago
Because of this post, CEOs around the world are receiving 3x emails today.
Haha, just kidding. It's actually the opposite. The reason CEOs respond is because they get much fewer emails from customers than you'd imagine. They get their typical solicitations, internal meeting emails, external business discussions, but the customer emails can be interesting and more insightful than any internal letter could be. If you put time into it and write your letter which doesn't require a huge time investment to response (i.e. avoid dozens of specific questions and allow the discussions to be open-ended), you might get a response. If any human is contacted by another of our species, it's intrinsic to want to respond. Being a CEO doesn't remove that desire. Yes, you might be bothering them a bit if they sacrifice family time, but that's their own problem/choice!
- xster 8y agoHow does one even discover the email addresses of CEOs (or board members)? It's not like they're searchable online and guessing common formats only gets you so far.
- vortico 8y agoLinkedIn is a good place to start. Curriculum vitaes if you can find them. Asking around. Some CEOs of smaller companies than WD-40, typically startups with a younger age group, give them out in the About page of their website. Sometimes you can just guess (e.g. jeff@ some large used book company .com). Every time you discover one of these email addresses, you think "I could have guessed that on my first try."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aantix 8y agoIs it even legal anymore to cold contact a CEO in Europe?
- elygre 8y agoWhy wouldn’t it be?
- aantix 8y agoBecause you don't have their consent.
- ascorbic 8y agoThe ePrivacy Directive only applies to unsolicited marketing emails.
- Moru 8y agoTo private people, their company mail is not included.
- popol12 8y agoYou're not a private entity, are you ?
- FooBarWidget 8y agoThe GDPR defines multiple legal grounds on which you are allowed to process personal data (such as collecting an email address for contacting). Consent is only one legal ground. Another one is "legitimate interest", which a lot of salespeople will use in order to find prospects. However the recipient is allowed to say "not interested, don't contact me again" and you'll have to comply. Furthermore the GDPR does not apply to small-scale, ad-hoc, personal situations. Contacting a CEO as a customer is fine. Your personal phone's address book is fine. So is keeping a list of attendees of your birthday party. But wearing a camera on your body all day and recording everything and running face recognition on the video, even if you do it for personal reasons, is not ok.
- aantix 8y agoLegimate interest can only be established if both parties consent upfront. For which he did not. He just emailed them outright. With the original article, it's obvious that he's written a lot of CEOs. How many is too many? What if it were a couple of thousand?
- spondyl 8y agoRather than guessing, you can also connect to the SMTP gateway of that company using telnet then enter rcpt to:<ceo@company.com>. It'll tell you if that's a valid address or not. Rinse and repeat.
- solotronics 8y agoand much lulz were had
- mrep 8y agoGoogle search or guess. Jeff Bezos email is jeff@amazon.com if I recall correctly. I also emailed Paul Graham 3 years ago thanking him for one his blogs that ironically led me to not pursuing the startup path and he responded to it.
- TomVDB 8y agoI just googled the email of the CEO of my company. First hit on Google was https://www.ceoemail.com https://www.ceoemail.com. And the email address matched the one of our Outlook server. So it's apparently very searchable.
- erikb 8y agoThis is like the legend that pretty women don't get approached by men.
- heavenlyblue 8y agoSadly enough, I've actually had lesser luck contacting local businesses in the UK as a customer, than contacting larger ones.