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

16 points

1 day ago

| 5 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 day 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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muzani

10 hours 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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phs318u

1 day ago

[-]

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 day 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 day 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 day 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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bix6

1 day 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 day 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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csomar

1 day 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.