You're right that active, direct customer outreach in early stages, talking to real people at events, user interviews, forcing them to talk to you etc is the only way to validate and refine PMF. But to me, this isn't really "outbound" in the spammy, growth hacky sense that I critiqued above. It's thoughtful customer development: qualitative, deliberate, personal, strategic, and hopefully founder lead.

The real outbound I'm against is that lazy "spray-and-pray" approach, or the obsession with hyper personalized yet fundamentally shallow cold outreach that's mistaken for scalable growth. Real GTM, once you truly have PMF, is actually pretty mechanical and clinical. That said, personally, I've always treated early GTM as inseparable from product refinement. Every interaction early on is about learning and adjusting, (sorry Arch, you just had to go!) not aggressively scaling. "Rapid growth" is alluring, sure, but if it isn't anchored in real market validation, as you're pointing to: it ends up as expensive noise.

Marketing was always a grift when it was done to get rich quick, yesterday or today. Products, brands, businesses... take a long time to bake!

These people live in a different reality than the rest of us, one they've likely taken steps to convince themselves is true so they don't have to feel bad about their actions. I met someone years ago that was basically a professional email spammer that described his job as marketing and sending newsletters and was convinced that people were OK receiving spam and that he was providing a service by spamming garbage to people who didn't sign up for it.

I think this is an underrated metric in terms of how advertisers are organizing their spend; the creep factor. If your first impression with a potential customer is creeping them out, how are the odds of them giving you a sale?

Just my 0.02.

If someone was paid to kick my puppy, I'm not going to just be OK with it because, "hey it's their job, and we're all struggling."

Just reminded yourself that they've chosen to remove themselves from the pool of 'real people' by participating scammy activities. They're the ones that have broken the social contract and treating them with respect just lets them continue to believe they aren't doing anything wrong.

Unattractive person walks up to you and asks you for your number - spam.

Company has a thing I need and calls me at the right time - not spam.

Company calls me up when I'm not looking to buy something - spam.

You know the answer. Only assholes need clarification that unsolicited contact is spam.

So there is only a handful of primary entities: Humans, Leads, Deals, Communities (thus no Pets, Contacts, Tasks, Photos, Documents, etc).

I might expand it to capture more data in the future, but waiting to see what users make use of.

Who leaves that meeting and starts searching for a solution in their spam email?

This is why I wrote "it depends on companies and marketers realizing that they need to be proactive about it".

It costs next to nothing to set up a server and configure a bot that mirrors your twitter posts to the Fediverse. If they done just that, they'd be solving their end of the chicken-and-egg problem, and all they would need then is some patience and treat it as a Pascal Wager, where every round of "Here's something stupid that Musk did today" would be a change for them to convert the users to their preferred network, or to just maintain the status quo.