We do but it doesn't work the same depending on the country.
For example, in France (where we were originally based) and Europe, it's pretty effective if we call the company we target and ask for the right person (thank you Linkedin).
Though, we recently moved in the US and the first calls we made didn't really work. Some people were even pissed that we called them from nowhere and where wondering how we got their phone numbers.
Possibly relevant: We work in mobile advertising
This is GENIOUS. Nothing more to say. Now buy some ads, contact big news websites and profit. Maybe take some vacations, I know a great website to find awesome deals ! ;)
What you say is both very true and very false, it depends a lot on the product.
Advertising can be an amazing way to get money and sometimes, even if you could directly sell to your users, advertising can perform WAY better.
The real important factor to decide wether you should put ads or not is "will I probably get a few paying customers or just a lot of users ?".
Advertising is all about the volume, the bigger it is, the more money you'll make and a good relationship with your advertisers can lead to really good revenues and a real business model.
When we launched our first product with my company, our only competitor was a paid app. We thought "f* it, we'll make it free!". We now have 600k monthly active users and make way much more than our competitor. So maybe not every business should "sell". With social media &cie, it's starting to be really easy to get a lot of users and ads can be an amazing way to monetize it !
Actually, it's pretty easy to setup such a system if you have the "right" tools. The most famous tool, Tweet Attack (link, but I am not affiliated or anything http://tweetattackspro.com/) can reveal itself super powerful. You can create a lot of accounts, make them chat together, tweet naturally as well as mentioning people, auto follow/unfollow.
Those tools are really popular and if you know how to search you would find a lot of these kind of accounts.
But don't worry, Twitter is aware of that and works to get all these accounts down. All the spammers get their accounts deleted pretty fast now, unless they are very careful.
While it might not be interesting for some people already working in a company (as you mentioned in the FAQ), it might very well be interesting for some students for example. Instead of an internship, they could work on their project for 2 months (or more) with your help. This is an amazing initiative. I study (in parallel of my own company) in a really good engineering school specialized in the field of computer science in France. If you would like to get some people there. While I am not directly interested, I could help you get some students there. Drop me a mail at arthurquerou [@] gmail.com if you are interested.
Pretty interesting article in the way that you explain some really diplomatic way to handle these kind of situation. But I really think the best way to avoid these kind of problem is to set each founder role in the company. I just wrote an article about that as a reaction to your article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5029029
Amazing service, the only thing missing (and that would stop me from using it) is the ability to check the Free Text input with a regexp (to be sure that the user input is a valid email, phone number etc...)