This week's drama around Directify and me

Hey everyone,

This week was very tough for me and I want to share about it.

Dublicate Product

Week started with accidentally finding out that somebody created exact copy of Directify, and named it also Directify, just with different domain, .io instead of .app. Talked with the guy, and asked my community members to convince him that it’s not a good idea to have the same name and domain for the same product. It can harm both our SEO efforts, it can confuse customers, so both businesses will be harmed.

We convinced him, and he turned the domain down, so we will compete under different names. Competition is always good. But not with the exact same names.

Bug bounty hunter turned out to be a scammer

Some “bug bounty hunter” was claiming that he found a bug on my website. But I recognized the pattern, as someone with different name contacted me few weeks ago, with the exact same message. Then he started to blackmail me, saying that he will share about the bug in his blog if I don’t pay him $250 upfront and then $250 after he shares the bug with me. Anyway, of course I rejected him in a rude manner and he started to threaten me that he’ll break all my websites.

After that directify.app was under heavy DDoS for about an hour, and I never heard of him again.

Angry customer

One of the customers made a purchase, and contacted me that he bought through his friend’s affiliate link, and the commission wasn’t applied. He started to act rude and claimed that I must apply 50% commission to his friend immediately or do refund so he can purchase again.

I decided to talk about it with the affiliate himself, and checked the account, his account was fine and seems the guy just used direct link, at least that what was shown in the affiliate dashboard. The funny thing is, that the affiliate guy was fine, and he had other affiliate sales, but the customer was still not calming down, even after saying him, that this between me and my affiliates.

The conflict ended with threats and insults again, he called me paranoid rude and disrespectful, and claimed that, quote “YOU HAVE CREATED A PROBLEM WITH ME!”, while the problem was with affiliate, with whom I took my business. He threatened that he will report me and make sure that everyone out there knows about this incident.

People think that when they pay your product a $100, they can talk to you however they want, whenever they want, and only them are the most important thing to you in the world and you should tolerate that. Nope. I respect fairness and kindness, and that’s how I treat my customers. If you decide to be disrespectful, then don’t complain receiving the same.

Directify LTD deal price increase

On February 24th, the Directify Lifetime Deal price doubled. That was the decision about which I was thinking for a while already, and I finally made it.
Product got a lot of updates and improvements, the most recent one - integration with Google Sheets. And the product already overgrew the initial LTD offer. It’s still super cheap compared to competitors to be honest, while offering unlimited usage of the product, but for now it’s a fair price.

If you are hearing about Direcify the first time, it’s a No-Code Directory Website builder.

This is it for this week.
Stay strong and have a nice weekend.

Your,
Serg