Episode 442: Schedulefly Stories: The Time We Were Flagged as Spammers

Restaurant Owners Uncorked

How do you get the word out to thousands of independent restaurants that you’ve launched your company?
At that point, social media wasn’t a thing. We didn’t have money for advertising. We were buying Google AdWords, but not many people were looking for restaurant employee scheduling software back then.
So what do you do?
One thing we tried was going to each of the ~7000 restaurant profiles on OpenTable and getting the info@ email or whatever email was listed and sending an intro email. Tyler did this, manually. He literally went one by one.
The first day had had emailed over half of them over something like an 18-hour period. The next day when he sat down to knock out the rest of them, BellSouth cut off his internet access. He had to call and convince them he wasn’t some mass spammer who’d be sending thousands of emails every day in perpetuity. He just needed to finish this list and they’d never hear from him again.
So they cut him back on. And he finished the list. And we got a few dozen customers from the effort. Mission acomplished!
P.s. Five years after Tyler did this, Paul Graham from @ycombinator wrote a GREAT piece about building startup companies, “Do Things That Don’t Scale.” It’s here: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html