A competitor's ex-employee tried to sell me their secrets
by GetSMSSomething interesting happened recently.
A guy who claimed he had worked for one of our competitors showed up in our inbox with a price list. He said he had access to their confidential supplier and client information and wanted to sell it to me. He also claimed the competitor was making around $100k in net profit every month. Among the things he offered were:
Confidential supplier information
Confidential client information
"Niche edits" targeting auto-registration software clients (not really sure what he meant by that)
Contacts of bulk buyers, especially ones who use auto-registration software
Access to Chinese marketing websites that could supposedly be used to attract customers
Now I'm curious. If I don't want to buy someone's allegedly stolen/internal data, how would you legitimately figure out this stuff?
Where a competitor gets its customers (SEO is an obvious reply, but what else)?
How do you identify niche websites where their target audience hangs out?
How do you estimate whether a claim like "$100k/month net profit" is remotely plausible?
How do you identify these "Chinese websites" where their target audience hangs out?
The guy may have genuine information, or may simply be trying to sell me a very expensive fantasy. Either way, I'm not paying for it.
I'd rather figure out how to reverse-engineer the same information legitimately.
What would you investigate first?
