Is outbound going to die?

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceptions of Outbound and Spam

  • Many commenters equate outbound with spam, regardless of AI involvement, and see it as intrinsically disrespectful and often scam-adjacent.
  • Others argue outbound is ubiquitous and “just business,” especially in enterprise SaaS, and can’t be inherently scammy if nearly every serious company uses it.
  • Several participants report intense irritation at cold calls and drip campaigns, especially to personal numbers; some now never answer unknown callers or immediately hang up.
  • There is disagreement over whether cold calling is socially unacceptable or merely annoying but legitimate.

What Counts as Spam?

  • Competing definitions:
    • Any unsolicited communication (email, SMS, calls).
    • Unsolicited mass communication.
    • Simply “any communication the recipient doesn’t want,” putting definition entirely on the recipient.
  • The thread exposes logical inconsistencies when trying to reconcile “mass” with “recipient-defined.” Some insist even a single unsolicited sales email is spam.

AI, LLMs, and the Outbound Arms Race

  • Many already see obvious LLM-generated outreach (LinkedIn, Upwork, drip emails) and dismiss it instantly.
  • Concern that as LLMs enable “infinite outbound,” the channel will be flooded, attention will crater, and everyone will mentally tune it out.
  • Others think this is just a continuation of longstanding email templating and that fatigue has been here for years.
  • There’s an emerging “arms race” view:
    • Sales uses AI to scale outreach.
    • Recipients will counter with AI call-screening, spam filtering, and even personal agents to evaluate vendors without human sales.

Relationship-Driven vs Spray-and-Pray

  • Several experienced GTM voices argue durable growth comes from: trust, brand, word-of-mouth, community, and founder-led customer development—not mass outbound.
  • They distinguish thoughtful early customer discovery (interviews, events, face-to-face) from “growth-hacky” spray-and-pray campaigns.
  • Outbound is seen as more defensible for very high-price deals, where targeted, strategic outreach is viable, but the article is read as mostly about lower-price segments (<$50k).

Ethics, Labor, and Trust

  • Strong moral criticism of telemarketing and deceptive drip campaigns; some feel no obligation to be polite to workers “participating in the problem,” others emphasize low-wage constraints.
  • Several note a shift from an “attention economy” to a “trust economy”: hyper-personalized outreach that feels creepy or dishonest actively damages brand trust.
  • Some hope AI-noised outbound will level the playing field in favor of genuinely good products and trusted relationships rather than aggressive sales tactics.