A person tried to poach my customer. It ended up backfiring them🤐

While competition is definitely healthy for both startups & customers to ensure the ball keeps rolling, it becomes a little foggy when startup founders adopt a zero-sum mindset

I got a surprising message from my product's (Famewall) customer today 😐

While they thought that the customer would migrate to their platform following this message, it ended up backfiring them when they brought this to my notice instead 🤐

At first I was disappointed and upset after coming to know that it was another indie hacker whom I knew, was doing this.

But rather than venting out my frustration directly at the person, I just took a brief pause.

I wanted to see the bright side of this incident. Though the action by the indie hacker was a major letdown, I became truly grateful to have a customer, so kind to let me know of this issue at first hand 😄

As indie hackers, we face a lot of struggles in the early days when there are no sales & growth flat lines.

This strangely forces us to resort to "growth at all costs" & even engage in things which would not feel right, morally.

So having all these thoughts in mind, I just sent out a simple message directly to the indie hacker.

And I got a surprising reply from them 😯

Sometimes we never know what the other person is going through. It definitely pays to be kind :)

While we're mostly used to seeing startup milestones and revenue numbers, I just wanted to take a moment to share this in public .

Sometimes kindness can become an unfair advantage even in the brutal world of entrepreneurship 😄