Sorry about this. When I used the term fraternity, I didn’t think of it as male term (I was briefly in a co-ed frat in college w/ 70% women). Oops! I see that this was a terrible slip up! Apologize for terrible word choice.
Basically I enjoy events and building communities (inclusive ones!), and I wanted to throw more and create some sort of social club / support group. Appreciate you bringing this up so I can change the messaging to be more inclusive.
You didn't actually say you were building a fraternity. You said "I'm building a social club and support group for engineers/designers/product people, some wearing a second hat of founder/investor."
You mentioned fraternity only in this way: "Imagine something like a mini-fraternity (in only the good ways) with dinners, retreats, bonfires, product jam sessions, meditation, improv, basketball, whatever people want to do socially & professionally".
It should be clear you are not describing an attempt to make Silicon Valley "Animal House," except to those who are going out of their way to find problems. In my opinion you have nothing that needs apologizing for.
I don't think you have an obligation to release the numbers publicly, but I think you should run the numbers on the ratio of women, people of color, etc that you sent this invitation to and see how you feel about it. Bear in mind as well that the way to get underrepresented groups involved is to demonstrate to them that they won't be the only/token member participating.
Sounds like a missed opportunity for a bot then... It is not like you are really personalizing the message at all. The only human part of this would be deciding which photo to use to entice the developer. (Could this be optimized by a bot and A/B testing?)
I agree with the other comments that this is a useful feature, but would be more well suited for a customized twitter account with a name explaining it better.
the idea of a bot is intriguing, but right now I'm manually finding founders contact info, reaching out, getting them in the system, asking them Q+A's on producthunt.com, cc'ing other relevant players in the convo, and following up with them to see how PH influenced their traffic and how we can help (which, again, founders respond gratefully for all the free traffic)
If anyone has suggestions for ways to automate part of this, as it takes a long time, i'm open!
Ever try emailing founders instead? I wonder if you'd get a better and/or faster response.
Perhaps you could require your product submitters to insert the contact email for the products they are submitting. Then, you could auto email the founder as soon as their product is posted on Product Hunt.
