I agree. I interned for a company that was kind of competing with [fairly big startup that most of you have heard of]. At the time, Company was way smaller than it is now, but was still bigger than us. (We had very few customers; no one had heard of us whereas I'd already seen mentions of Company on HN several times; they had fulltime employees other than the founders and we did not.) Despite this, any time anyone mentioned our name on Twitter (not even in dissatisfaction), they got an @reply.

Not only was this annoying and sketchy, but it was totally unnecessary. We were no threat to them. They would have been better off doing just about anything else with their time.

Even though Freshdesk doesn't @reply everyone who mentions Zendesk (just those who are unhappy with it), and even though Zendesk is an "incumbent" (in the absurd Valley way where anything that's been around longer than a year is ancient), this still gives me a really bad impression of them (as does this whole PR stunt), and furthermore, they'd probably be better off building their product and figuring out how to best meet the needs of their current customers.

> [...] they'd probably be better off building their product and figuring out how to best meet the needs of their current customers

That's nonsense -- a variation on the "Field of Dreams" fallacy of "build it and they will come". Customer acquisition, which PR and marketing feed into, is absolutely essential.

In fact, your advice is the opposite of what most programmer-founded startups should do. You don't win by having a better product that nobody's heard of. And I think anyone that's been hanging around startup-y folks for a while can tell you about a handful of friends who misunderstood that point to their own peril.

All that this post really did for me was make me hear FreshBook's name again. In fact, the ZenDesk naming spat is more likely to make me actually remember the name. And that's probably enough that if my company is looking for a SaaS support tool in the future, that we'll give them a look as well. Which is assume is exactly what they were hoping for.

For all the talk of what they're doing to their pristine brand here and blah, blah, I don't think anyone serious is going to hold this move against them in a purchasing decision. Bringing in new infrastructure software is not done on a whim.

Eh, I would hold it against them. If they're willing to do shady things in their marketing, who knows what they'll do with all that valuable customer data they're holding on to for me. Signing up for them is like taking them on as a business partner, and trust is a really big part of that.

You should have seen Steve Blank relate his tale with a smile when his Stanford Lean Startup students spammed the faculty in order to achieve some traction. Twitter spamming isn't a business model, but there is one stage of a startup's life when you have to do things that any self respecting person is reluctant to do, but for the survival of the company. Even Balsamiq did that.

Over at Mixergy, about a year ago, the founder of a BabySitter service talked about how she sneaked into university campuses to post advertisements, all the time humming the "mission impossible" tune to keep her in the right mental frame.

I wouldn't call emailing bloggers about reviewing your product (given that that's what many of them try to do) something a self respecting person should be reluctant to do. I assume that's what you're referring to with Balsamiq? That's the right way to do it - get the press to give your product some attention because it's really good! Putting up flyers in public places is also fine.

It becomes spamming when you insert an ad for your stuff in a personal place like on the windshield of someone's car, or in someone's twitter client's @ inbox, unless you think it's something they'll legitimately want to hear because they need help that you can offer (this is rare). Predatory customer acquisition from your competitors via spamming is well on the other side of the line. Combined with this reaction site which uses tactics that would be at home in a political smear campaign, and I'm fairly certain that this is a company I don't want to ever do business with.

Listen to Andrew Warner's interview. Peldi talked about approaching people on twitter due early days to try to do sales. He wasn't very successful with the approach, and then went on to try something else.

    I'm fairly certain that this is
    a company I don't want to ever do business with.

That's the respectable side of you talking. If you have a house on the line in your own start up, you'll be crazy not to do everything to give your startup every chance of success.

On a personal level, I loath getting spam as much as everybody else, so please don't spam me!

Oh interesting, hadn't heard that part of the story.

I don't know about that - my thinking is that if blackhat is the only way to get something to succeed, It's probably not a very good idea anyway, and I'm probably better off spending my time doing something different.

The biggest risk to a startup is that people don't know about their product. Spamming is not a long term strategy, but it might be useful in finding the first few customers to get customer development kick started.

This seems like a bad attitude - that whatever sleazy thing people do is excused by them having over-spent their way to desperation.