Today was an embarrassing day.
It was supposed to be a great day. We launched a brand-new email newsletter. We were all very excited.
So excited, in fact, that we sent the newsletter to the wrong email list. We spammed our best friends.
Then I made it worse. I sent an apology to the list. But the poorly-worded apology made it appear that the original mistake, and the apology, were both shameless scams to promote our new newsletter.
I’m getting a ton of angry email from friends who think I broke their trust. Worse, I’m getting a ton of emails congratulating me on my supposed cleverness. So even the people who like us think we spammed them as a marketing stunt.
This is horrible and embarrassing.
My career and philosophy are based entirely on teaching trust and ethics. For years I actually made my living fighting spammers and teaching companies how to use email ethically.
For the record: This was not our intent, we would never do such a thing, and I’m sorry.