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A big company and its new manager held off our pay, we took in all their sales.

“I work for a Technology Company, which falls in the startup/medium enterprise category. Let us refer to this as MyCompany.

We were working on creation of an internet of thing (IoT) based product for large industries, but as we were new to the domain, we had hired couple of industry experts to help us understand the domain and help us with understanding the gaps. This is a common practice.

Some new folks stepped in…

Enter BiggerCompany, a company that has been dealing with devices for over 15 years now. They had a product in our same domain named BigProduct. They had BigProduct version 5 running in various places which was built on legacy stack.

Their new version BigProduct 6.0 tanked really hard among their clients and they needed someone who dealt with better technology to help them built their product and that brought them to us.

This seemed like a good thing.

The coming of BiggerCompany was really good for OurProduct as they had really good insights to bring to the table. As being a major player, they wanted us to build BigProduct 7.0 instead of OurProduct, but being a product company that was out of scope.

Thus we decided to be API providers for as to backend capabilities while the UI looks different. Think of it as different buttons in your webpage, but similar functionality. We were also responsible for bundling and deploying the application.

Just to make things clear…

Legally, we have signed a contract says MyCompany clearly owns the code and they have no right to see or recreate our code, just to make us indispensable as API providers for BiggerCompany.

Things have been going well for both of us and the both products were shaping up well.

Incident:

Suddenly, one day BiggerCompany gets a new guy to handle the product, BigManager, and we see some redflags immediately. Major escalation and blame-gaming for every deployment and everything, eventually to a point where we were tired of the engagement with BiggerCompany.

We were targeting a major product expo for October 2019 and so were they.

Something fishy was going on…

With the BigManager came in some associates who kept asking technical questions and logic and stuff and pestering our developers, this led to a suspicion that they were trying to micromanage and peep in on our tech stack, which made our team work on better encryption for our code (essentially making things even better for us).

He changed few keys in the database and complained that there was a bug. We sealed off the database. He decided to not pay for the engagement showing our “incompetence”. He also sold the license to the product without paying us to some of his clients.

One fine day, they called a junior developer asking some doubts which resulted in him joining a call with them. The link was soon shared in our teams chat and almost all of us, including my CEO, joined the call.

Now, we promtly had things recorded. Our plan was simple, make sure that their product doesn’t get presented for the major expo. We pulled sufficient proof to prove that there was non-compliance with our contract.

It’s over!

The next day, we pull in the legal team and decide to call off the engagement. We also hand over the entire documentation on the same day. (The team pulled an all nighter, also, we had seen this coming.)

One of the things that was scheduled for next week was to make their deployment https complaint. Now, for most on premise deployments in plants, people really don’t go with SSL enabled products, but for the expo, a secure deployement was mandatory. They did not have this, which meant they can talk about their product, but cant show it in real time.

(We actually were open with a “try it out for free”.)

Now, things looked bad for them for the expo, but they were still bigger players and had a larger client base.

We changed the look of our product, and called it OurProduct 2.0. It is the same product, but looks different, and word got out that BigProduct 7.0 runs on OurProduct1.0 and man, our stalls were filled with their clients who were not pleased with their earlier product. (6.0, the one that tanked)

What BigManager might have never understood is that what actually happened wrong for him.

Boy, was he in for it…

With every escalation mail he sent, our team became slower for him. We pushed him to a place where he decided to build on his own. What he did not realise was that was exactly what we wanted him to do.

We had started the preperation of 2.0 in parallel for the expo. We had every intention of ditching them before the expo. We had no intention of upgrading their security for the expo.

Soon after the expo, we cancelled license to all their clients and when they came barging in to the doors of BiggerCompany, they pointed to us. We were more than happy to reinstate their products and as a gesture for their inconvenience, we gave them OurProduct 2.0 with no migration charges.

BiggerCompany currently doesn’t sell the software, or do they? They are pretty much irrelevant.”

Here’s what people had to say.

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Another individual thought this was a solid story.

One Reddit user started a conversation.

Pro revenge!

That’s how it’s done!

Want to read another story where somebody got satisfying revenge? Check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.