How we source business contact information

The short version

We find businesses in public records, send one email offering web design, and stop the moment anyone says stop. A few dozen messages a day at most — this is a studio, not a mailing operation.

Your address was published somewhere public. Either your business put it on its own website, or it appears in a government register that is open to anyone. We did not buy it and we did not guess it.

Which emails are actually ours

This website is gbtn.studio. The outreach is sent from a different domain, gbtnstudio.com, as ben@gbtnstudio.com.

Same business, two domains. They are kept separate so that outreach can never affect the delivery of ordinary studio correspondence. If you checked the sending address and it did not match the site, that is why — and now you have both, so you can confirm it.

Anything claiming to be GBTN from a third domain is not us.

Where the information comes from

Three kinds of place, all of them public:

Public government registers and official records — federal trademark filings, federal research grant and award records, federal contractor registration, securities filings, small business loan records released under freedom-of-information law, state business registrations, state professional and industry licence registers, and federal permit registers.

Public platforms and directories — product launch platforms, crowdfunding campaign pages, trade show exhibitor lists, trade and business association member directories, app store listings, and public job postings.

The business's own website — the contact address a business publishes on its own site, for people to use.

Every lead carries the name of the specific source it came from, recorded at the moment it was found. That is why we can always tell you exactly which register or page yours came from rather than waving at "public sources." Ask and you get the specific one.

What we actually hold

The business or brand name, the name of the person listed on the public record, the published email address, the website, the city and state, and a description of what the business does — usually in its own words, taken straight from the filing or the page.

Before an email is written, a model reads that public information and writes a short brief on the business, so the message is about you rather than a template with your name dropped into it. That brief is kept alongside the email that was sent. It also records a best guess at which pronouns to use, taken from a first name, purely so the brief does not read awkwardly. It is a guess, it is never shown to you, and it is deleted with everything else.

That is the whole picture. There is no profile beyond it, no scoring of you as a person, and no automated decision that affects you in any way that matters.

What we never do

We never buy lists and we do not use data brokers. Every address traces back to a named public record.

We never guess an address. No firstname.lastname@company.com, no trying the common ones to see which bounces. This is enforced rather than promised: where a model is used to read a page, any address it returns is thrown away unless that exact address literally appears on the page. An invented address cannot survive the check, because the string it invented is not there.

We never connect to your mail server to test whether your address is live. We check whether the domain can receive mail at all — a question about a domain, not about you.

We never take anything from a private or non-public source, and we do not scrape sites that ask not to be scraped.

Why you got it

To offer web design services to a business that might find them useful. That is the entire purpose.

Your details are not sold, not rented, not shared with clients, and not published anywhere. There is no advertising network involved, because there is no advertising.

How to be removed

Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link. Press it and you are removed — immediately, permanently, and with no confirmation step designed to trip you up.

You can also reply to any message with the word unsubscribe, or email info@gbtn.studio and say so. You do not have to give a reason and you will not be asked for one.

Mechanically: the opt-out is written to storage the instant it arrives, and the sending system reads that list before every single batch it sends. It is not a scheduled job that might not have run yet. Nothing can go out to you in the gap. A copy is also emailed to us at the same moment, so the removal survives even if that storage is unavailable when you press the button.

For completeness, since it means your address sits in one more place: that list is held by Upstash, a hosted storage provider, and the copy reaches our inbox through Resend and Google Workspace. What is stored there is your address and the time it arrived. Nothing else.

And if you would rather do nothing at all — you get the first email and at most two follow-ups. Then it ends by itself.

How long we keep it, and the one part that is permanent

Everything substantial is deleted on a timer. The email we sent you, the brief, the pronoun guess, your location, what your business does — all of it is removed automatically 75 days after the first message. That window exists to cover the follow-up sequence and any late reply, and then it is gone.

One thing is kept indefinitely: your email address, on a list of addresses already contacted, and — if you opted out — on a permanent do-not-contact list.

This sounds like the opposite of what you want, so here is the reasoning. Those lists are the only thing that remembers you. Our system finds businesses in public registers, and those registers do not forget you either. If we deleted your address entirely, a run next year would find your business again, see an address it had never contacted, and email you as a complete stranger. The record is what makes "we will not contact you again" true.

So what is kept is one email address and a timestamp — the least we can hold — for the sole purpose of never contacting you again.

If, knowing that, you still want the address itself erased, say so and we will do it. It is your call and not ours. Write to info@gbtn.studio.

Legal basis and your rights

Where GDPR applies, we rely on legitimate interest — Article 6(1)(f) — for business-to-business contact using business contact details the business itself published or a government register made public. The balance rests on all of the above: published business data, one email and at most two follow-ups, an unconditional opt-out, and no profiling that has any legal or similarly significant effect on anyone.

You have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to object to us holding it, and to ask us to restrict what we do with it. Email us and say which one. We aim to answer within seven days, well inside the month the law allows.

For US recipients: every message carries a real sending address, a real reply address, a working opt-out, and a physical postal address, as CAN-SPAM requires. If a message from us ever lacked one of those, it was not from us.

Who to talk to

Any of the above — info@gbtn.studio. Replying to the email you received works just as well and reaches the same person.