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

12 points

by nduncan_hmc

16 hours ago

8 comments

story

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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