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Ask HN: VC-funded startup lurking in my community Slack – how to respond?

17 points

1 month ago

| 9 comments

I run a small bootstrapped open source startup in a niche space. Growth is slow but steady and we're starting to win larger customers as the product matures.

Recently, the leading vendor in this space ($50 million in funding, dozens of employees) has starting camping out in our community Slack and cold-emailing our community members, offering them thousands of dollars worth of free credits to switch to them. Emails are not exposed in our slack, so they are getting people's names and googling where they work to deduce their email.

The vendor's employees are registering under fake names so there's no straightforward way to ban them from the Slack.

Has anyone else been in this situation, if so what did you do?

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0_AkAsH_03

1 month ago

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Remove them! Plus post about them openly on social media.. it'll give more traction to your product, plus expose such behaviors by big companies.

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radsj

29 days ago

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Use the situation to your own advantage. Here is what I would do:

- Make sure to post on the community that this is happening and people should help call them out

- Use this to bolster your messaging and differentiation. Needs work, but will pay off in long run

- Start monitoring their keyword/domain name via tools like F5bot (or others) and start inserting yourself in those conversations. AI agents now make this possible for small teams as well. Play their game. And beat them at it.

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phs318u

1 month ago

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Ban them? You haven't said but I assume the vendor's presence in the Slack is not disguised. Either way, it's your Slack and you're entitled to determine who is welcome and who isn't. You are under no obligation to be providing your competitors with a free channel and free leads.

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nduncan_hmc

1 month ago

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Their presence is disguised. They're creating accounts using gmail addresses and fake names. Edited my post to make that clear.

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phs318u

1 month ago

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Make a big deal about the shill/fake accounts. Educate people as to the benefits of your offering vs theirs and explain how even with their "free credits" offer, it's a poor alternative. I presume these offers are made in DM's? I'm not aware of any "forum" type software that allows admins to prohibit DM's.

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nduncan_hmc

1 month ago

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They're actually googling people's names, seeing where they work, deducing their work email, and emailing them.

Looks slightly less shady than DMing them I guess.

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timedrun

27 days ago

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Your community members like your product enough to tell you about this, so you could announce the camping issue to your community members.

You could also ask your community members to adopt the email/messaging protocol which will require legitimate emails to include parameters which you and your community members can decide on.

Check this profile for the email if you wanna ask for more info or get updates.

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csomar

1 month ago

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There isn't really much you can do about that. They'll find your customers one way or another (ie: GitHub stars, your packages, issues, etc.)

Don't worry about it and just focus on serving the customers you have.

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agcat

29 days ago

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I agree. Honestly just focus on building good product and customer relationships!

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bix6

1 month ago

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I think you need to make people sign up, agree to TOS that prohibits solicitation, document the bad behavior, take it to a lawyer and sue for damages.

You gotta trap them somehow and prove damages.

I’m not a lawyer though so just a guess.

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nduncan_hmc

1 month ago

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Haha that would be satisfying, but I don't really have the time or money to spare on a court case. But they do.

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muzani

1 month ago

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Make announcements warning people of these shady folks. Collect evidence of what they do, encourage your community to share what they find.

Hell, announce to the people that these guys are offering thousands of dollars to switch to the inferior product. Take control of the narrative and turn it against them.

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ashed96

28 days ago

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As others mentioned, you can't stop them from doing this. It's a cutthroat game where companies will try to poach customers however they can.

Best defense is making your customers so happy they won't switch, but tactically:

- Create a private Slack/Discord for paying customers only (harder for them to infiltrate) - Move community to a platform with anonymous usernames (Something similar to Reddit-style forums or Discord with display names) - Add some soft vendor lock-in -- a bit evil but sometimes necessary - just maintain the balance between retention and not being user-hostile

On a positive side, if a VC funded startup is this desperate to poach your users, you're clearly doing something right.

- from fellow wannabe bootstrapper

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kosolam

29 days ago

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What’s your business model?

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nduncan_hmc

28 days ago

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It's an open source project, but we have a cloud-based instance that you pay to use. Also, we sell paid support plans for companies who want to self-host us.