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4 Comments

Is my customer acquisition strategy unethical?

Today I was introduced to a new #nocode tool called Softr.io (highly recommend). So to experiment I go into my playbook of ideas and find something I think is mildly cool to make a project around.

In the recent Presidental debate, somebody in the Twitterverse mentioned that it's crazy there was no ASL interpreter. It's something that I haven't thought about but it's really important (especially in politics).

So for this project, I created a subscription service to BSL & ASL interpreters.

This is for content creators like Vice, Al Jazeera, BBC, CNBC, Fox News, ESPN, and more to have access to quick and professional interpreters to make their online content (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram TV, etc) more accessible.

For me, ideation and development it's relatively simple. Where I get lazy is marketing and sales so recently I've been more proactive in attempting to improve that.

My marketing strategy is:

To start a change.org petition to challenge the largest content creators to begin to create multichannel content that is accessible to the Deaf community.

Then I provide the service to creators and show people are demanding accessible content from them by signing the petition.

Question: Is this unethical?

Additional Notes:

My business model would be auto-interpretation for X amount of content a month for X price and then charge hourly after that.

Website: https://zign.softr.io

on October 2, 2020
  1. 1

    To me, it's unethical if you are trying to hide the fact that you're building a solution. If you're visibly identifying the problem and making it clear that you're working on a solution for it, that seems fine.

  2. 1

    I don't know a ton in this space.
    But if it's live I assume ASL is better than an automated or delayed closed caption?
    I assume other productions that have time and are not live probably have more accurate captioning and is more cost effective than someone doing ASL?

    But I know live & automated closed captioning is usually not preferred over ASL for the completely deaf community. I THINK...

    Probably reach out to your potential prospects to get some feedback early on before building something.

  3. 1

    @dominiconorton go for it mate! let me know when you start reaching out to Vice & all, I got couple tricks up my sleeve ;)

  4. 1

    I don't think it's unethical at all. And I think you're onto something...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUwxnaPxe_E&ab_channel=BridgesfortheDeafandHardofHearing