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14 Comments

Rudest email/comment you have ever received?

I recently got an email from a potential customer about my product that was incredibly rude and it took me back a bit.

The email was comparing my product (just me), to a well-established competitor that has been operating since 2016 and the features of each. The email ended with "You have very little to show and teach". Wow. Yikes.

What is the rudest email or comment you have ever received?

  1. 6

    Not sure if this qualifies, since it's not email but Twitter, but I'm Asian, and while marketing my SaaS to potential customers, a competitor came by and chimed in with: "Ahh, here comes the Chinese copycat."

    1. 2

      Yikes. That qualifies for sure!

    2. 1

      Oh man, super rude.😐
      What was your response?

      1. 2

        I retweeted it I think.

        Hopefully it worked as some sort of Uno Reverse Card. 🤷‍♂️

        1. 1

          Karma will find its way ✌

  2. 4

    It is part of business if you do it long enough :). Consider it one level of graduation. You have officially received your first rude email/remark. That's a good thing. It means you are moving up in the world. I have received a few over the years and I just learn from them.

    Just a week or so ago, a prospect threatened one of our SDRs with "I will tell everyone not to buy from you" and started abusing the SDR with things like "You are an idiot and I want to talk to your manager".

    Another one. An existing client was EXTREMELY rude to our support staff on support tickets and always would send a ticket with things like "This is such basic information. How bad you have to be to be not able to solve this. You guys are such idiots". My support team was terrified of that client and were not sure what to do. When I found out, I immediately called him and terminated his account and gave him a full refund. Didn't want his business. He threatened to leave bad reviews. I said go right ahead. He moved on.

    But this is like literally 2-3 customers over last 6+ years out of like 1000 that we have served. So yea, mostly it is a non issue.

    1. 2

      In my experience anybody who quickly goes to the line "I will tell everyone not to buy from you" has no friends and nobody to actually tell this too. It's not the type of attitude that engenders a strong relationship network.

      1. 1

        Yea I know :) The best thing is that those people don't leave any doubts in your mind whether you should business with them or not. The answer is obvious and clear.

  3. 3

    A customer threatened to "throw feces" at our office front door back in 2014, because we were slow at doing customer support ( we didn't have a person dedicated to C.S. so we just took turns daily!)
    Nevertheless, an interesting email back trying to defuse the situation and a huge laugh between us!

  4. 2

    Some people are terrible. You talk to enough people and you will find the terrible ones. Sucks but unavoidable. All the best!

  5. 2

    I spent ~20 hours building out a bespoke API on my SaaS for a single customer FOR FREE because I liked him and wanted to support his specific business goals. His contract developer wrote him and described my api as 'an abortion' because it was missing a couple fields he wanted. First time in my career I've had my code described as an abortion, I keep that as a badge of honor.

  6. 2

    Once an IH member got chummy in the comments and asked if he could set up a call with me to discuss his product and I said yes. So we go through the motions over email and I said something like, you show me yours and I'll show you mine. Reasonable enough, bring and share and all that!

    Well, he launched into a tirade about how I was marketing to him and using his contact data against GDPR and all the while I was offering my time to him.

    Hilarious really. I honestly don't know what happens to manners online, it's like they evaporate. Manners cost nuffink as my gran likes to remind me.

  7. 2

    I got a signup from an email address that was something like yousuck at amateur dot com 😂

    1. 1

      The fake email ones are always so creative and innovative.

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