While a cease and desist order from LinkedIn closed one avenue for entrepreneurs Ryan O’Donnell and Marco DiDomenico, it didn’t stop their ingenuity.
It all began, when out of necessity, the duo developed SellHack earlier this year to help their startup, Sociagram, a cloud-based video platform.
“I was spending a lot of time trying to connect with retail executives,” says O’Donnell, who’s responsible for sales. “I always go for warm introductions first and if I can’t get that, I go for cold emails. Guessing email addresses became a time-consuming, cumbersome process.”
So DiDomenico developed a technology, which used JavaScript to render a HackIn button on any LinkedIn profile that, when clicked, searched public data sources to find the user’s email address. When O’Donnell saw how easy it was to find contacts, they shared the free app with other entrepreneurs.
Suddenly, on March 31 of this year, O’Donnell returned from a trip to find SellHack traffic at unexpected heights.
“The first day I was back, we noticed a big traffic spike,” he says. “Then our Twitter account started going crazy; people were saying, ‘Don’t give up,’ and we still didn’t know what happened. I went into Google Analytics and looked at our referral sources.”
He found articles from Yahoo! Tech and other industry blogs calling SellHack “sneaky,” “nefarious” and “no good,” claiming that it violated privacy and hacked LinkedIn’s servers. Of course, it didn’t access its servers; it only processed public data based on profile permissions. But the press caught LinkedIn’s attention, and the social network issued a cease and desist order to remove the HackIn button.
“We weren’t in a position financially or with the size of our team to fight,” says O’Donnell, who saw the request as a detour, not the end of the road. “It wasn’t enough of a strong point that it was ‘fight or die,’ so we chose to comply.”
O’Donnell and DiDomenico removed the button immediately at LinkedIn’s request, and went back to work building a version that would comply with the concerns that had been aired.
Meanwhile, signups soared from 2,000 to 25,000 — with more on April 1 than its first 60 days combined. It was a prime example of bad press triggering great results, so the duo stayed out of the way and focused.
“We took the position of not saying anything,” O’Donnell says. “We weren’t trying to poke the beast with a stick. We kept our mouths shut, and we just worked. We bobbed and weaved and made it into something more successful that’s in compliance with their request.”
Within a couple of weeks, another version of SellHack was launched with a pricing plan. Now, through a Web browser button, the app searches eight public data sources — returning valid email addresses 70 percent of the time to help sales professionals find contacts.
“I don’t think we would have been as successful as fast, had it not been for the cease and desist,” O’Donnell says, noting that growth remains steady, with more than 40,000 users.
How to reach: SellHack, (330) 552-8283 or app.sellhack.com
