CrunchLeeches
One of the things every startup worries about is getting plugged on TechCrunch. I know we did. Will they cover us? Are we ready for the exposure yet? Can our server handle the traffic? We had the first one covered since we were part of Y Combinator, but the rest were concerns.
Everyone wants that TechCrunch bump, and wants it to go smoothly, but what nobody told us was all of the crap that happens as a result of the coverage. I don’t blame any of it on TechCrunch, it’s just a side-effect of their success. Once you get listed on their site, if you have contact information available you’re bombarded by a stream of annoying bullshit.
The worst was a Dell salesman. I think his name was Matthew Lamm. He emailed pitching hardware, which would have been fine if that were the end of it. We weren’t interested in buying their stuff and told them so. Then he put me on some sort of list, to which he sent out every out of office notification. Every time there was a holiday I got email notifications about his being away. A salesman I don’t know whose product I was not interested in buying was telling me he was away for Christmas. It was just frequent enough to annoy me, but not quite enough for me to take time out of a busy day to filter them out. Worse yet, I finally sent him a terse email, got off the list, only to wind up back on it when he left Dell and a new salesman took over his accounts.
As annoying as that was, though, at least he had some sort of email software that sent them all individually. A few of the CrunchLeeches (what I call them since they feed off of the blood of startups covered) just send out one giant email with everyone CC’ed, meaning that everyone who replies is emailing you too. Limelight Networks is the most recent offender. (I’ve had this problem with RockYou too but not due to TechCrunch.) Just this week I got a Season’s Greetings from Limelight, which I think is a CDN (way to pitch static file hosting services to a fantasy sports startup there buddy) and surely enough in came the replies. I am willing to sell the list of a few dozen emails found therein to any competitor who wants them. It’s not very nice, but then neither is Limelight blasting my email to a bunch of people I don’t know or care about, and adding more garbage to the giant pile of emails that greets me every afternoon when I wake up.
Then there are the slightly less odious but many times more voluminous headhunters. Every single one in the entire country at this point has cold-emailed me to tell me about a candidate they have who would be great for us. Of course, we use Ruby on Rails and Flash, while all of the candidates are .Net or Java guys. I suppose Rails and Flash devs are too in-demand at the moment to waste time with headhunters, but still, it would be nice if they at least tried to match up technologies, rather than just spamming me every programmer they get who likes sports. Or, you know, didn’t bother me at all.
All of which is not to say that it’s not worth being on TechCrunch. It is, especially if you’re the right kind of startup. It’s just that your junk folder is going to be bursting afterward.
