Quote:
Originally Posted by nilaynilay
half truths and glaring omissions
A few pertinent facts:
Nilay's theft was discovered because he stole a large majority of sales over a ~2 month period. Once we investigated we found thefts going back more than a year. He would code maybe one large sale each month or so as trials or one of my horses and would keep extending the trial. He admitted to all those thefts. Since then we have uncovered additional thefts and have confirmed via teamviewer wire transfers and Skrill transfers to Nilay from the client receiving the NCA HUD. The clients confirmed that this wasn't custom work.
This was not 8-10 very recent sales where the money somehow went missing and Nilay was eager to make it good. This was long term outright theft.
Nilay's repayment play was as follows (he offered this as soon as the theft was discovered), $500 immediately (this is when we thought the theft was 4 figures) and support NCA using his portion of the sales to repay the theft. Also that all thefts were admitted to and if any were later found the deal was off. I reluctantly agreed as my alternatives were to take over support myself or find someone else to do so. If I had more time I wouldn't have agreed, but I didn't think I could do a proper job of support due to my time constraints and I doubted I would find someone decent.
It took a number of requests to get the $500, even though there had been significant thefts right before we discovered Nilay's theft.
A month or so after the repayment agreement was made a request to buy a NCA package went unanswered for 3 days in the middle of the week. I became aware because that person contacted me directly. Once I investigated I also discovered other older unanswered support emails and then found he had abandoned the private forum and had not answered a post starting from the day we discovered the theft. I had no choice but to end any relationship with Nilay.
Nilay claimed he had been on holiday and hadn't thought to let anyone know or have an auto reply for support emails. I'll let the reader guess how I feel about someone stealing from me and then taking a nice holiday.
Within a week I had someone new to handle support and we've fully supported NCA. I was insanely lucky to find a truly phenomenal individual, both as person and a programer, to take over support.
The only way an advanced HUD stays competitive is to be constantly updated. The NoteCaddy developer is tireless and any HUD that strives to be cutting edge has to work to keep up.
We decided that upgrading NCA wasn't a good option, as the architecture was extreme convoluted and nearly every stat would need to be rewritten to take advantage of the latest NoteCaddy features. So we built a new HUD from scratch. It would not be an exaggeration to say that we've spent $200K in time and money to build this HUD. While building the new HUD we answered every NCA support email. Once the new HUD was ready every NCA customer was emailed and offered a free upgrade (whatever package you had with NCA you have with AJA) to the new HUD. That offer still stands.
I also made the decision not to sell NCA while we were working on the new HUD as it was about 6 months out of date at that point. As soon as the new HUD was ready we offered free beta trials to anyone who approached us to purchase NCA.
Now that the new HUD is ready we are not supporting NCA. There have been a huge number of advancements to NoteCaddy-timing tells, new graphical range representations, action sequences that make for much more accurate stats....it's a huge list. NCA is missing anything added to NoteCaddy in the 12 months. I
All NCA clients can switch over to a massively more advanced HUD for free (not at a discount, free as in no money). How is that treating NCA clients poorly? They can still use NCA if they like and if needed they can still download it. We're just not updating NCA and trouble shooting user issues like we do with our new HUD.
The idea that Nilay is concerned with NCA customer support is so ludicrous that...I don't know how to describe my reaction. Bewildered at his bizarre alternative view of reality, I guess.
I am not blameless here. I made some incredibly poor choices. NCA started as a way to give my horses a better HUD and something we might sell for a few bucks. It turned into something larger and in that transition I let things grow without every stopping to reassess my role and my lack of ownership/control. Nilay was fantastic in the early days. On line constantly and spent months working 15 hour days to build NCA. His personality was always very grating but I can deal with that if someone works hard and does good work. I didn't have the time to manage something like this and was happy with my role as a consultant/spokesman with a profit share.
As soon as the money started rolling in there was a big change from my perspective. Nilay has always maintained that his support is the best in the industry. All I know it that it would often take repeated emails from me to get a response from him and each week I'd have several people contract me directly as they felt their support needs weren't being met.
That is where I messed up. I, along with someone else who works for me answering emails and handling affiliate business, starting handling any support that came to us. I took the short term easy way out. Sure, there were some epic email rants on my part but those fell on deaf ears and I knew it was an exercise in futility when I was writing them.
As soon as I became concerned about customer service I should have taken whatever action was needed. Even today, I don't know what that could have been, but I should have done something. At the time I thought very seriously about leaving NCA over my customer service worries but I was concerned since so many players had bought NCA on my reputation that it would be wrong to leave them. So I preservered.
It was a valuable lesson that I sadly knew before this whole ordeal: Always control what you create. I will never again allow myself to be put in the position where I feel I lack the control needed to do what I think is right.
You know what really bothers me? No apology. Not the slightest hint of embarrassment or shame.
This whole ordeal has been extremely stressful. I'm not a person who feels regretful. Each failure is a lesson and makes me who I am today. I fully regret having ever met Nilay. Maybe with more time I'll appreciate the lessons I learned.
