A Competitor Crippled a $23.5M Bootcamp by Becoming a Reddit Moderator

Summary

Let’s say you decide to start a coding bootcamp. Your background is in pedagogy and you love teaching. Your parents were teachers. You find a co-founder, raise a bit of money, and pour your soul into your company. The first couple of years, students love your program. Positive feedback, extraordinary student outcomes, employees love the mission. You are quite literally changing lives. Your business grows. One day, you realize you’ve grown to 70 employees. And then… A competitor gets control of the main subreddit for your industry by becoming a Reddit Moderator. That watering hole becomes their megaphone. They are not shy about using it. An all-out attack on your brand begins. The barrage of accusations and harassment are relentless. The attacks happen daily. You become a neurotic fixation of the moderator. Every little thing you do represents your failings as a company. You get compared to a sex cult. One of your employees is accused of nepotism. The mod starts joining your company information sessions for prospective students, slinging conspiracy theories at every turn under a pseudonym. You avoid outright bans to avoid appearing biased yourself. Your own employees start wondering if these accusations have merit, some leave. Even worse, confidential information from your company starts leaking out. There’s a mole. Or at least your team suspects it. No one knows who to trust. Your carefully built company culture? Eviscerated from the inside out. Any time you attempt to defend yourself in the main subreddit, posts get deleted. Or you’re accused of running a Reddit bot army. This goes on for years. Every day, another attack. Every fucking day. Student applications drop. First a little… then a lot. Combined with a market downtown, your revenue collapses by 80%. You go through 2 layoffs just to keep the lights on. A bunch of other folks move on. You’re down to 15 employees now. The attacks don’t stop. If anything, they escalate. And you begin to wonder, as the CEO and f...