Danielle Ralston, founder of ND Hive, describes a coordinated hack that compromised her personal and business accounts, posting illegal content and destroying years of memories and business pages. She suspects competitor sabotage, details the toll on her health and eight-person team, and asks for support ahead of a Product Hunt launch.
Chapters
I'm gonna be using a script for this because one, my brain just can't function right now and I need to really share, share something. I'm gonna do no cuts. I'm gonna be raw and stumble on my words because I am neurodivergent. But life sucks right now, um, because I need to talk about something super serious that happened to me over the weekend. Somebody used my social media My personal Facebook account and our ND Hive business accounts to post illegal content involving children this weekend. And it almost destroyed— well, I mean, it did. It took out my personal Facebook account, which is someplace that has some memories of lives, of being at band gigs with my husband over the years and going to concerts with friends. Friends— I have a friend who died of brain cancer a few years ago, and I have so many videos of her and I from Facebook Lives together. And and pictures of me with my grandmother, they're all gone. Facebook won't give me my data back right now. And then it took out all of IndieHive and all of that stuff, but it only took out some of my business pages. I had like 12 business pages, it only took out some of them. It was very systematic. They used my license, somebody got ahold of my license, which I know if you know what you're doing online, somebody can do that. To get into my accounts and totally took over and destroyed everything. And one, panic. Two, neurodivergence, we kick into high gear. I protected everything, and then I found somebody was trying to get into our website, and I had to protect our website, and I had to— my bank account got hacked, or somebody attempted to get into my bank account. My bank did a really, really good job. And then somebody attempted to get into my LinkedIn account, like This was very, very systematic. And for those that don't know, I'm the founder of ND Hive, ND Out Loud, ND Visionary Partners, and we've been preparing for a huge launch. We did an organic launch about 2 weeks ago. We've been preparing, um, for a huge launch, uh, on Product Hunt Wednesday night. 24-hour marathon for me as the founder to launch on Product Hunt. And months of work. This is months of work for us. We built this app. We're really proud of what we built. We built an amazing community, and it's a neurodivergent platform built by neurodivergents to help people start doing life and not alone so that we can live life together. And the weekend before this huge launch, all my accounts get hit. That was systematic. It's not a normal hack. They posted horrific material, and that means I'm also being investigated now. Um, it gets your reputation destroyed, it gets your accounts permanently shut down. Like, the fact that I lost my Facebook account, even for business, by the time I recover it, even if I can get it back, I'll have rebuilt that. I'm neurodivergent, I know what I'm doing. I don't care about that. I care about all the memories I lost. And when something like this happens, platforms don't ask questions. They shut everything down, as they should. Like, I, I protect, protect kids, absolutely. But years of work, my communities, my followers, access to people who rely on me, it's all gone. Like, everything is gone during a launch week. Am I stressed out? Yeah. Have I slept much? No. If you think I look good on camera, This is not a filter. It's really good makeup. It's not a filter. And then I have MS, and if anybody understands what that kind of autoimmune issue is, it's stress makes my body attack itself. And I am— I know, a 1 to 10 pain scale, I'm 9,000 right now. I'm in a lot of pain. And stress for me isn't just the emotions. I mean, yeah, but it's pain, it's muscle spasms, it's extra exhaustion. I On a week where I have to be up for 24 hours straight, my body is absolutely not cooperating, and I don't have time for that this week. And do we have an idea who did this? Yeah, we think a competitor did this, which is absolutely horrendous because there's nobody who does what we're doing. Most everybody offers one-on-one coaching or just body doubling or something, but we have productivity platform, we have software, we have community, we have ten plus hours a day of body doubling, we have ten plus hours of on. Yeah. We have on-demand coaches with neurodivergent coaches who are also professionally trained outside of just the coaching industry. We have all of that and we offer it affordably. But this feels coordinated. Things have been removed in some places and not others. Accounts are disappearing. And it was just suddenly gone. And it's definitely— trying not to cry. It's devastating. But here's part of what really gets to me. We're not a massive corporation. We are a team of 8 people. We're all neurodivergent. We're ADHD, AuDHD, some combinations there, burnout. We have people in our community with burnout and anxiety and other chronic illnesses like me. And all we do is get shit done. We help people get shit done. We're not another planner. We're not another app telling you to try harder. We're not one-on-one coaching because we know that humans doing human things together in community succeed. That's all we do. I help people clean their house, get paperwork done, and make doctor's appointments and eat lunch. I mean, I don't understand why somebody want to attack that. I just— I don't understand. Does it hit a nerve? Yes, I'm pissed. I am trying to keep my language down. I'm really pissed off. We already feel when we're neurodivergent that the system in the world isn't built for us, and now somebody's trying to prove it once again. And I built the hive to fix just one tiny part of it, just one, so we don't have to do life alone. Somebody's trying to take that away from me. So this week hurts. Hmm. Physically. Emotionally, professionally, as the queen of a hive. But here's the thing: when I shared with my team yesterday, when I shared with my team yesterday what was going on, their first reaction is we protect the hive. You're the queen, and we protect you. So we're NeuroDivergent. We are stubborn. They kicked us, but the hive is still here. If you have ever felt like the world just tries to make everything harder, come join me. I need all the help we are— we can get right now, because we are the hive. We were built to support one another. I know this is a long video, but if you could support, and if you see your see ND Hive stuff, we do still have ND Hive on TikTok. That hasn't been taken down. Don't ask me why. If you see my content, if you want to help, we just need support. We need people to show up on Product Hunt on Wednesday from midnight Pacific to 11:59 Pacific that night and just support, comment, share, like help. I need the help. Um, my team needs the help. Um, we are the hive. Come join us and be part of it.
