How Facebook Killed My Startup Last Year

If your company’s future depends on the other “controversial” companies’ APIs, don’t event try to launch it.

Hi! I’m a software developer and an entrepreneur. I decided to launch my new startup named “Botdelive” after many fails of my entrepreneurial career (with gained great experiences). It was a bulk message sender through Messenger like Botletter, Manychat, and Chatfuel. I was aiming to become Mailchimp but for instant messenger applications.

I found a bug in Facebook’s API in the middle of the development. I did report it to Facebook on October 21st. An employer of the support team requested more about the issue. So, I provided them with the details. After that, I could not get any conclusions about my issue.

I requested an update on November 13th. Because if I didn’t remind them, they wouldn’t get back to me. After a decade, I got a message on November 28th from a different person.

“Apologies for the delayed response. The issue is still under investigation. We will reply here once we have further update.”

After his message, I waited with patience until December 20th. And again I requested an update. This was my last response and they never gave me an update.

I took a moment and thought about what decision I should make. Because AWS was charging me for an inactive product and I needed to take action against this situation.

I shut down the project until Facebook came up with a solution.

Anyway, thanks, Facebook!

Must read: The Risks of Working With Another Company’s API
Quora question about this topic.