16-year-old Indian-origin founder accuses customer of trying to ‘destroy’ his startup

Indian-origin startup founders are facing a hard time with their companies right now. From being blackmailed to being defamed, anything is up for grabs when it comes to them. Recently, a 16-year-old Indian-origin founder has called out a customer for bullying and threatening to 'destroy' his startup over what he claims is a misunderstanding.

Om Patel, a Canada-based entrepreneur shared that the customer began threatening him after facing a login issue, even though it was fixed immediately. Patel, is the founder of BigIdeasDB. In a September 2025 interview with Indieniche, he described his startup as “a platform that helps entrepreneurs and founders discover validated startup ideas by analysing real user complaints from G2 reviews, App Store reviews, and Reddit threads.

”It was during the COVID pandemic, that Patel began to learn coding at the age of 12. He launched his startup in early 2024 and since then, it has generated over CAD$23,000 in revenue.

The customer attacks

Earlier this week, a customer named Adam emailed Patel and called his product a scam. He demanded an immediate refund, failing which he threatened to post negative feedback about the company on “every Hackernews article and Reddit post”.

“Hi, as you know, this product is clearly a scam. The content is fake, the login does not work (redirects to localhost), and the platform is broken. Either refund immediately or I will:

The founder responds

Adam's email was sent at 9:45 pm and within four minutes Patel responded saying an update had been pushed which would fix the problem in under 30 minutes. “Somehow, a pull request was merged into main with a redirect to localhost (that's why you weren't able to get in) after the Stripe Webhook was created,” he explained.“I can assure you this product is NOT a scam, just a simple misunderstanding and that's 100% on our part,” he added. Adam however, did not buy the explanation and pushed on his demand for a refund.

Thus, Patel took the matter to X. He shared the screenshots of their exchange and accused Adam of trying to "destroy" his startup and reputation. He claimed the customer continued with his threats even after the refund was processed. He explained that Adam purchased a subscription to his product but found a login issue within minutes. “I offered a full refund immediately. No questions asked. Problem solved, right? Wrong. Even AFTER processing his refund, he continued with threats and hostile messages.”Additionally, he also accused the customer of bullying him because of his age. "Some people think they can bully you because of your age. Imagine being so entitled that a 30-second technical glitch makes you try to destroy a 16-year-old's entire future," he wrote at the end of the post. The netizens rallied behind the founder, advising him to move on and continue improving his startup.