Tag Archives: nen

Startups and Spam

These two “S” words are not often used in the same sentence but I had to use them. Everyone hates getting spam but not everyone hates sending spam. I too like most others get a daily quota of spam in my email account despite the spam filters. While most of those spam emails don’t generate any bad feelings because I simply choose to ignore them there’s this category of spam which I can’t help feeling bad about. This category of spam originates not from shady people selling enlargement creams or Viagra pills but from people who actually own and run less or more popular companies/sites. Most of the spam emails that I get from the category mentioned above are from various early stage startups based out of India(except wayn) so it seems like spamming people in such a way is a trend more popular in India only.

Sample these:

“Hi
Someone close to you had invited you to join www.xyz.com
Please visit www.xyz.com and register, you may win an illuminated t-shirt.”

and

“Your friends have been inviting you to join www.xyz.com”

As if the shady generic signup spam emails like the one’s mentioned above weren’t sufficient that we now also have spam vote for me emails like this

“A friend of yours provided us with your email address and suggested that you would be open to provide 2 minutes of your time to support a startup company engaged in a worthy mission.  We have been nominated in the TATA NEN Hottest Startups contest.  We are writing to request you to vote for us.”

“worthy mission”
was it ? Not sure if anyone who gets this spam email would vote for them, I certainly won’t(despite the fact that I liked the site’s interface when I looked at it for the first time)

I fail to understand why these sites/companies have to resort to such stupid ways of spreading the word. Why why why ? Firstly, I am not a big supporter of mass emails, for I am not really sure if they do more good than bad and secondly if you have to (for whatever reasons) mass email people keep in mind the following things

1) Don’t address it to everyone.
Hi all, Dear all etc are a not a good way to start an email which is not addressed to a known/close group. They look spam from the word go. I’d rather read a mail which reads “Hi Mayank” or at least a “Hi”.
2) Don’t use vague referrers:
“A friend of yours”, “Someone close to you”, “Your good friend” or something weird like this is sure shot sign of a spam email. If you have a referer name use it else don’t pretend to act genuine because this just doesn’t work.
3) Make the text interesting:
I won’t mind reading a random email if its written properly and maybe a bit witty. It should be a run of the mill promotional email.

That said, I’d like to advice startups(and others) to not bombard random people like this as it might give you small returns but it most certainly will piss others off which might have been neutral towards you otherwise but now think of you as evil/lame.  No points for guessing what image I now have for the startups who sent me those spam emails.

kwippy nominated for TATA NEN’s hottest startup awards

TATA along with NEN have started a competition for India’s hottest startup. TATA is one of the biggest and most respected companies of India and for the uninitiated NEN( National Entrepreneurship Network) is a non-profit organization, and India’s leader in entrepreneurship education. The nominations for the contest are open till 22nd October 08 and 30 shortlisted startups will be announced on 6th Nov 08 which will again be open for public votes and five winners would be announced on 23rd December 08 { Yes, it’s far 🙂 }.

Even before we got to know of these awards in detail somebody told us that Kwippy has been nominated. Thanks a lot to those who nominated kwippy. Its been a few days since kwippy started showing up on the awards website but amid the hussle n bussle of action on kwippy it kinda slipped our minds. It was when I logged in to the awards site to see if we’ve got any votes I found that not only we’ve got some 20 votes without us really doing anything to make people aware also that we are ranked 47(not bad I’d say). Given the fact that there’s quite some time left and we can let people know about this, am sure kwippy can do much much better.

If you’ve liked kwippy even a bit or you’ve know anyone from the team please go ahead and vote for kwippy 🙂

To vote click HERE

Or type HOT<space>106 and sms to 56767