A competitor emailed me moments after I signed up to Stripe

For those that aren&#x27;t aware, there is a growing class of lead-generation startups which scrape websites and determine what services you&#x27;re using.<p>My guess is that the company that contacted you is using one of these (Stripe requires your public key in the head of your site and linking to their JS). BuiltWith is one such service: <a href="http://builtwith.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;builtwith.com</a> ... NerdyData &amp; Datanyze also: <a href="http://nerdydata.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nerdydata.com</a>, <a href="http://www.datanyze.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.datanyze.com</a><p>Subscribers use these tools to find people who are trying out competing services (they are not cheap, BTW). Often, if a site only recently added JS code–for example, say, KissMetrics–you can assume they are still in the trial period. That gives you a window of time to try and sell them on your competing product. Or, if you sell a special WordPress plugin, you can use these services to find WordPress sites.<p>Stripe doesn&#x27;t have a trial period per se, but its pretty easy to switch between the modern payment providers and if it was only recently installed, its safe to assume you don&#x27;t have a lot of customers yet.

Can this be explained with a birthday paradox? If there is a large number of people signing up to Stripe and a large number of people receiving spam emails from Stripe competitors, probability that some people will receive a spam email just after signing up to Stripe may be non-negligible.

I confess I&#x27;ve been trying a similar kind of thing attempting to promote a website of mine. I find people who&#x27;ve written about competitors and email them inviting them to try my site and asking for their thoughts. Is this scummy or is it acceptable? I&#x27;m hoping it&#x27;s different because the pertinent material is public, rather than private like in the OP&#x27;s case.<p>---<p>Edit: I think in retrospect watty has a point, I&#x27;ve removed the links. I also didn&#x27;t expect this comment to rise to the top, and it is kind of off-topic. Apologies.

A competitor didn&#x27;t e-mail me moments after I signed up for Stripe. It&#x27;s coincidence.

Ironically, I found this on BlueSnap&#x27;s website...<p><a href="http://www.bluesnap.com/ecommerce/legal/prohibitions-and-dmca/spam-notification" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bluesnap.com&#x2F;ecommerce&#x2F;legal&#x2F;prohibitions-and-dmc...</a><p>BlueSnap does not allow the use of any BlueSnap links and products in any type of spam activity. If you believe that a BlueSnap link was used in spam activity please submit a report to spam@bluesnap.com and include the relevant link&#x2F;s and message&#x2F;s.<p>Merchants and Affiliates are requested to review our guidelines on avoiding spam to help stay on the right side of the relevant legislation.

I too suspect it is coincidence but two questions to add to my database, one are you using the Chrome browser, and regardless of browser do you have any extensions that help you &#x27;fill in forms&#x27; ?

As sanswork said have you asked them where they got your details from? It could just be a coincidence.<p>Or, when you said you &#x27;played around with the [stripe] service&#x27; did you put any stripe code on public sites?

I bought medicine online one time. Moments later I received an email to purchase Viagra. Coincidence?

I had a similar experience with spotify&#x2F;rdio. I personally don&#x27;t think these emails are a coincidence<p><a href="http://creativaldo.tumblr.com/post/73662726109/is-spotify-spying-on-my-rdio-activity" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;creativaldo.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;73662726109&#x2F;is-spotify-sp...</a>

I think this is a clever marketing scheme by Stripe. Now hundreds of HN readers will sign up just to check if they get an email from BlueSnap. I know I did.

Did you put any of the code on a site? There are services that will scan sites for snippets of competitors code and alert a company when someone is trying their service.

this title is misleading. 40 minutes is a very long time, hardly &quot;moments after.&quot;<p>Considering the fact that I get about 3 postcards a week pushing merchant services and credit card processing, I think this is just a coincidence.<p>As a marketer, especially in the fast paced online world, if I had the ability to pull this strategy off, I wouldn&#x27;t wait 40 minutes. I would pull the trigger instantly, and since it is spammy as it is, I would use a much more aggressive sell. (not that I would ever do this... I wouldn&#x27;t!)<p>I see Blue Snap is running marketo on their site, so they clearly are doing marketing automation, and if they are at all sophisticated, they probably have some pretty advanced ways of deciding who to email, when.

For what it&#x27;s worth that marketing message assumes you are already in production with someone else and transacting actively: &quot;I do understand you may feel as though you are all set in this area&quot; Rather than win your entire business away they want you to start using them for <i>some</i> payments. If they thought you were actively looking to add a PG for the first time (ie somehow knew you&#x27;d just signed up for Stripe) it would be different messaging. So I think you may have signed up with them in the past a ways back and they think of you as an already processing site with a gateway.

I&#x27;ve seen a startup here on HN that was doing exactly this thing. Would warn you when a client signed up on a competitor site. I think the data was leaked from some kind of analytics app.

The lack of &quot;Me too!&quot; responses leads me to believe this is just a coincidence.

Curious how an article like this makes it to the #1 spot.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Synchronicity</a>

I&#x27;ve not experienced this myself. But have you asked them where they got your contact info from? I&#x27;d be curious to know because any possibility I can think of (outside of you posting on twitter or your blog, etc) would be extremely questionable.

That is creepy. I&#x27;m not sure whether the publicity from the blog post is going to generate more or fewer customers for the Stripe competitor, though.

I&#x27;ve had this happen to me on different topics (IIRC it did happen with Stripe a month or two ago) way too often to attribute it to coincidence. My working assumption is that online privacy does not exist anymore.<p>With all these microphones and cameras attached to all the net enabled devices we use, it&#x27;s a matter of time before offline privacy stops existing as well.<p>Email in 1985 must have felt weird too. Cheers, F

Without any other evidence you can&#x27;t conclude that this is anything other than a coincidence.

Personally I would want to see some kind of smoking gun like &quot;A competitor emailed me AT THE UNIQUE EMAIL ADDRESS THAT I JUST SIGNED UP TO STRIPE WITH&quot; - otherwise the mail could have just been a coincidence and could have come from anywhere.

It is possible that Stripe divulges your contact info to some affiliate that has been, well, infiltrated by the competition. I would be surprised if you got any concrete info from the competitor, either way.

If I search for JSP hosting, I see ads for it all over after. Not surprising if his searches and browsing triggered some marketing system that managed to email him.

Oddly enough, this happened with me and Mixpanel the other day. I signed up for Mixpanel, and just a few hours later got a cold email from someone at RJ Metrics

without further info I would guess this is remarketing in effect......if this person visited that competitor previously and they have remarketing system in place with google adwords or whatever...and have it set to track you to stripe then they know you&#x27;re actively in the market and send a cold email..... this kind of adwords remarketing has only started to get mainstream more recently I&#x27;d say...

ad retargeting, or &quot;stalker advertising&quot;. Cookie or whatever tracks movements, monitors for specific urls. When tagged client visits urls, system recognizes paying customers and sends &quot;friendly heads up&quot; email.

Off-topic: which blog engine is this ?<p>(I tried ctrl-s :)<p>(Because nice typo)

this is possible through datanyze, if I&#x27;m not wrong