We Were Hacked 4 Days Before Launch. Our ADHD Community Showed Up Anyway.

Hello, hello, hello. We are gonna do something a bit different than our normal here. Um, we haven't done a whole lot of content recently. One, we, we had a launch happening in the last couple months, has been insane. Um, and then we had a disaster. Uh, it's been almost 3 weeks now. 3 weeks.

Had it really been that long? Because I, I felt like it literally feels like a day. That's like about 3 weeks at the same time.

No, it's been 3 weeks.

Crazy.

Oh, no, it's been 2 weeks. Okay, good. It's only been 2 weeks, but still.

Okay, that's a little better.

Slightly. So this is gonna be very different content. Just bear with us because It's not— this is actually not an easy podcast to record.

No, it's not. And so you're gonna have to forgive us for being a little scattered. You know, we both have ADHD, so that may play a factor in that. But, you know, these are thoughts that are really coming from our hearts. You know, yeah, you're right, it's not easy at all, but it's something that needs to be said.

Yeah. And I want to be really upfront right now with everything that's gone on. We've had some stressful stuff getting the app ready to launch, and a few disasters happened there, which every founder that has launched software has felt that pain. So this— that is no different than anybody else.

Right.

But we're neurodivergent. So that adds to that stress. And I also have a chronic illness that does not react well to stress. So, my brain is definitely right now, I am definitely firmly in burnout, really struggling with burnout right now. So, that just adds on top of all of these things. So, one of the first things I want to do is I want to, at the top of this episode, I want to thank our current paid Hive member community.

Yeah. Yeah, just incredible. Like, we have We have like 100% positive feedback and positivity in a storm.

It has been amazing. It's been— I can't even express how amazing it is to see how amazing our current community is. Just absolutely hands down, y'all rock. Like, you are amazing. So I want to make sure that I say that at the beginning. Because you guys are what has held Tim and I together over the last few weeks.

Well, yes, but I do also have to say that Danielle also held us together. It was definitely collective. If you know anything about Danielle, and I know her pretty well, I've known her for a while, and she's very, very stubborn and she does not give up at all, ever. And that's going to be a message we're going to be driving home Through actions and through our words in this conversation. You're going to stick to this. You're not going anywhere. Certain people are trying to, you know, influence you in a sense of, you know, making you quit. That's not going to happen. Not going to happen.

So my son says to me the other day, he goes, My son is mega stubborn, so anybody that knows my son knows he is extremely stubborn. His— he comes by honestly both his father's side of the family and mine, and he's like, you can out-stubborn me any day of the week. And I'm like, okay, I'll take that as a compliment, thank you. And he's like, that wasn't, but okay, Mom. My son is almost 29. Um, so let's go back to what happens. Um, On March, we had a go live on Product Hunt. We were launching our app on Product Hunt on March 18th. We had been talking about this for weeks, weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. Why were we launching that week? Because one, it was neurodivergence awareness. It's Neurodivergent Awareness Month in, but that week is like the specified week that is Neurodivergence Awareness Week. And you want to know what? I'm really sad about right now, and I'm just thinking of this as I say this. We didn't get to celebrate that at all that week. I never once got to celebrate it.

Uh, we didn't, but we did because the community came together and my community celebrated it hands down.

I can't lie there, but I woke up, uh, was working on last-minute launch things on March 14th, which is Saturday. And I noticed somebody trying to get access to my ad account on Facebook. We were running ads to promote our Hive launch and all of that stuff, and I noticed somebody trying to get access and I shut it down. I mean, bots do that stuff all the time, no big deal, it happens. It's— that's Facebook world. Within seconds of me shutting down that first thing trying to access us We got bombarded, and I spent almost from about lunchtime on the 14th until I went to bed at 10 o'clock at night, attack after attack after attack and shutting it down. I spent extra money and got Meta Hive, the Meta verification, so that I had that extra level of protection. I did everything I could. I changed every password. Probably I counted 16 times that day. I changed my passwords. I'm neurodivergent. Changing my password sucks.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh. Um, 16 times I count, I changed my password that day. When I went to bed at 10 o'clock, I felt confident that my website was protected, my email was protected, my DNS was protected, my Facebook was protected. And I woke up at 12:58. AM on Sunday morning.

So yabba-dabba-doo, he's pushed the perfect time.

To 3 emails in a row that happened in the span of less than 5 minutes of somebody accessing my account, using a copy of my ID to take access of it, putting up ads, child pornography ads, on our account, and getting my Facebook page banned in less than 5 minutes. And what happens when your Facebook page gets banned? You lose everything. All your business pages, all your ads go down. I lost all my personal Facebook stuff, which means years of personal pictures, lives with friends that are now dead and gone, my grandmother, pictures that I took directly on Facebook to share with family— all gone. Everything's gone, and Facebook won't even talk to me.

Well, now, to that point, we, we, we have someone in our fold that's helping us with that. Like, we're connected to some people that can, that can help us in that realm, which is great.

Amazing. We have on our advisory board, we have some advisors who are being extremely helpful and doing everything they can to help us. I have to get them some more information, which is an executive function nightmare right now. But we have people who are helping us. Facebook is not helping, and I'm calling that out. Do we know who attacked us?

No.

You will not hear a name mentioned. You will not hear anything mentioned because we we don't know. Do we have a couple vague ideas? Yeah. I I had to talk to some three-letter people agencies. Through all of this because I was accused of some pretty horrible things. And if anybody knows me, that's a subject that is very near and dear to my heart. Um, so I'm talking to 3-letter peoples. Um, no, I can't tell you who they are and what all of that involves, but there's multiple agencies involved. Uh, but we have some people on our side trying to help. So that is— through all of this and all of that stress, that's amazing.

I, I have to say that we also have some really good legal representation that's happened as well.

It's um, we're really lucky.

Yeah, we are.

We're blessed. We're blessed. We're so blessed. Um, and we decided nope, we're not stopping. We're not stopping this. We're gonna keep going ahead. Our website somebody tried to get access to our website and take it down. Reported our website to Google. We've had over 500 videos on YouTube at this point reported. YouTube has given me back every single one of them. YouTube is— YouTube rocks. I, I just want to say YouTube system for that stuff rocks. It's amazing. And now there's a red flag on my account, so even if somebody reports my videos, they're ignoring that now. Um, for 30 days, it's totally ignoring it. I love YouTube. Um, Spotify, our podcast got taken and Spotify said— looked at— I got on with customer service, they looked at the covers of everything, and they went— they're looking at me on the, on the camera, and they're looking at my podcast episode going, you're on every single cover, here you go. Facebook won't do that. Somebody currently has access to my personal brand page on Facebook, and I can't get access to that. So we're trying to get that back because that's over 20 years. I think 20 years of Facebook posts and personal brand stuff. Facebook says they can't prove it's me. You want to know what pictures are all over that? My face is everywhere. Don't get me started on my annoyance with Facebook. But what does that mean for us as a company? It means that we're starting from literal zero. We have 18 people on our new Indie Hive. Instagram and Facebook page now, as of today.

Oh yeah, I mean, that's something. But that's something. You had thousands before that.

I had over 10,000 followers on Instagram alone and 6,500 on Facebook or something like that. I mean, I had spent years building that up for my, my business, and it's gone. It's all gone. But we still decided to go ahead. We still went ahead with the launch, and Product Hunt did not go the way I wanted. It absolutely did not go the way I wanted. But because I was hoping to be in the top 5 for the day, I had everything set up. I've done launches like that with other clients because I have worked in SaaS for a while and helped them do that. I know how to do that. That's not a problem. But I was crippled. We were crippled to have the access to our community. I mean, we lost all access to our community to message people and all of that stuff. But, and this is the huge but, and I'm gonna try not to cry. Our community, starting at midnight Pacific, showed up. I had from midnight until midnight, I had at least 2 to 3 members of my community on Zoom with me for 24 hours straight.

Wow. Yep.

Some of them were still on when I went to bed. They stayed up to still do stuff even though it was all over with. They were still going because they were running on a high. We had 141 comments from our community on Product Hunt. Even the top number 1 launch of the day only had like 20 or 30 comments.

We had 141 comments because our community showed And they, they continue to, they continue to do so. And that's, this is what we're trying to build, is a genuine, authentic community. And for some reason, that is a threat to someone else.

Mm-hmm.

Or some other entities. And that sort of boggles my mind because we're not looking to become this, you know, multinational conglomerate, billion-dollar organization. That's never what we're going to be. We don't want to be that. We just want to be a community that is accessible for people that are with ADHD. Generally speaking, they're in the lower socioeconomic background, and we're simply allowing an accessible community that's low cost, that's affordable, that's just genuine and authentic. You know, it's just a community where we all help each other, just like we've helped you, Danielle, during this time, and you've helped us. And for some reason, that's a threat to someone.

And, and I don't understand. We don't even compete with anybody exactly. I mean, are we an ADHD coaching agency? Yes, but we do it in a group program. We do it for very, very low cost. Somebody figured out last week, one of our members wanted to know how many hours a week we coach. 58 hours a week we provide coaching for $39.99 a month or $250 lifetime deal. We have a $250 lifetime deal right now. Or $39.99 a month.

Yeah, and that comes out to what, 16 cents an hour or something like that? Ridiculous.

I never thought of like working that out, but one of my AudiHD members had to figure that out. She had to know all the details, which rocks my world when they do that. And we're really— we just want to— we don't want people to live life alone. So we want them to come in and Make their doctor's appointments, fill out their paperwork, share their rejection sensitivity, ask for help to clean their house and fold their laundry and get that paperwork done, get their homework done. We have quite a few people in their graduate programs in our hive working on writing their PhD dissertations and their master's theses and stuff like that. We have college students. We have, we have Professors who come in to get their grading done and write their curriculums and all of that. We have people just at every walk of life. We have stay-at-home moms, we have lawyers, we have—

Don't we? We have a stay-at-home dad who has neurodivergent kids that could come in to just chat and, you know, get the community that he needs to help him with his kids.

Yeah, we have a few members who use the body doubling to build Lego sets.

Yep.

Just to not live life alone and to not feel so isolated. That's what we're doing. And again, our community is awesome. And I also, I want to call out the community on X. Whatever you feel about Twitter/X, whatever, I don't get into the political stuff, don't like it, who cares? I don't care. I did have an X account from years ago, and I think I had 3 followers. Okay, so like I, I wasn't using it until this happened, and I posted on X on what had just happened to me. And man, the founder community over there—

Oh well, I, I, I didn't realize this.

The founder community, they've been messaging me and saying, hey, have you tried this? And I had a ton of founders that also have other SaaS like launch platforms, kind of like Product Hunt, Thousand Tools, Micro Launch, all of that reaching out to me and saying, hey, post here, we'll help you, we'll help you get traffic, we'll help you with backlinks, we'll help you do all of the thing. And some of them for absolute free. Like they were giving me access to these platforms because they wanted to help. That's what the neurodivergent community needs.

Yeah, and we've been really tapping into that, you know, to, you know, like we need additional support, you know, amid the attacks that we're getting and we're really tapping into that. But again, That's genuine. That's authentic. We're not looking to tug heartstrings or get money. It's just more— we just want to continue to build our community because we know it's the right thing to do.

Yeah. And so we also have one of my clients I've had for a long time is actually a neurodivergent ADHD coach influencer. She has hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram and stuff like that. And she heard what happened. And man, that woman who was on her due date. Like, it was her due date, 9 months official pregnant, and she was recording a video for us and putting it out to her own audience to let them know to help us.

Yeah, that, that, that, that's just amazing.

I love our community.

Yeah. And Danielle, let's talk a bit about like what our plans are once we get to scale. To where we want to be. Because one of the things that, you know, one of the reasons why Danielle and I reconnected as siblings was when I called her randomly in August a couple of years ago, and I'm like, hey, what do you think about deaf people with ADHD? Like, what, like, there's no support out there for them. And the light bulb went off in our heads right at the same time. And one of the things that we're working on building, and we're We're in discussions with some very powerful people within the deaf community, is to create a program for deaf children with ADHD, just like Danielle, who's not deaf herself, but benefited from a deaf program in a very small rural school district, literally in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York. And it literally saved Danielle's life. And we want to honor the woman that is our angel by developing a program in her name. So like, we hope to be in a place in which we can make money, but the money is going to go right back into finding a way to continue to help people with ADHD from all walks of life to be successful in work, life, and home.

So this program, what we do again, Never Live Life Alone. We have an online community which is in a community area so you can post pictures Share memes, ask for recipes, get health and wellness advice, get relationship advice if you don't want to show up on camera and don't want to talk to a coach because it just doesn't work with your schedule for whatever. So we have an online community. We have body doubling slash coaching, and it's on-demand coaching with body doubling from 7 AM to 5 PM Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and 7 AM to 9 PM Monday or Tuesdays and Thursdays. So we're like, like I said, 58 hours a week that you have access to neurodivergent coaches that are experts in all kinds of areas. Uh, we have the community, we have resources. And if the resource does not exist, ask for it, because within a couple hours, one, somebody is going to hyperfocus and create it for you, usually me, because that's what I like to do. Um, but Shay will create a resource for somebody, I will create a resource for somebody, Rebecca has created resources when somebody asks. We create what you need. You get the support the way you need it because we all need support in different ways.

Yep, absolutely. And in addition to that, uh, during the week, we also have it open on the weekends as well.

Yeah. So the body doubling room, while we only staff it from 7 to 5, 7 to 9, depending on the day of the week, it is open and available 24/7. And I know for a fact we have people that log in at 2 AM almost every single day and are using it.

No, I'm not surprised. We're truly international as well.

Yeah, we have clients in Australia. We have clients in the UK. We have a client in India who just joined. So we have clients literally all over the world. The only thing that ties us together is we're all neurodivergent and we just want to support each other. Because even if one of the coaches doesn't have the answer for somebody, somebody will have the answer when somebody says, hey, I need help with XYZ. Somebody is going to have the answer for it. And I love our— and that's why community is so important. Because somebody is always there and always available to support. And that is amazing. So I want to call out some stats here and things. I want to talk about the positives. One, nobody's shutting us down. Are people continuing to attack us and to keep us from doing things? Yes. Every morning I'm combating attacks every single day right now. It's probably bots. But here's my philosophy at this point, and this is probably a very Audi HD stubborn Italian response. You want to know what? I know it costs you to run these bots. It costs you in resources. It costs you in developer time to write the bots. I'm going to keep costing you money. Keep attacking me. Keep going because I'm going to stick you out. I'm going to last longer than you. Just, just putting that out there. We're gonna keep going. And if I have to do it 20,000 different ways to make it happen, fine. And what did I spend my weekend doing? I spent my weekend literally writing skills and bots and stuff with some different AI programs in order to combat the things that are happening.

Yeah, I'm working on things as well. Like, we're like, first of all, like, I have put myself out here on this podcast. So I have stored up every password, every account that I have online. Um, we'll, we'll see what happens. But, um, you know, Danielle is my sister and I'm going to do everything I can to support her through this. Um, and I, I got my own plans as well to make this happen.

Um, yeah, we'll be back. Every single member of my team does. Uh, I was talking to one of our coaches this morning. She's like, well, I'm using my business and she makes stickers. Her business, her personal business is she makes stickers and she's trying to figure out how to weave ND Hive into everything she does so that she can promote through there. And, we have somebody that's a travel agent who's posting stuff. We have other coaches posting stuff that are in our ND Coaching Academy. We have, because of our stubbornness to put this out there, we had 3 new people join ND Coaching Academy this week.

Wow!

Because, they're like, if you're gonna have to go through this, we're going to help. How can we help? We wanna learn how to be as functional as you are in the middle of this. And, like, I don't know how functional I am. But I'm willing to teach you what I know. And we have— again, this community is amazing. So we are going to survive this. We are continuing. We are going to continue to build. We have plans to offer— open up a benefits package wing. And we are— we're well on the way for that. We're finishing up the website this week for that. I hope, Jamie. Hint, hint, hint. We are. We are ready. We are launching. We are talking to some really amazing companies. We are doing some really amazing things, and we are going to bring this to every neurodivergent person because we never want anybody to live life alone. We don't want somebody to feel isolated, kicked, beaten down, and and I'm not talking necessarily about bots attacking you and being hacked and all of that. Just life can beat us down, and let me tell you, the only reason why I'm still standing. right now is because of my hive. My hive— when I messaged— I started messaging my hive at 1 AM on Sunday morning, and members of my hive started answering me at 1:02 AM.

I'm not surprised.

I don't know who I woke up. Well, I do know who I woke up. Jessica freaking rocks. Jessica was messaging me, and Tara was messaging me back. Like, people were messaging me back. They were sending me jokes. They were sending me memes. They were like, how can I help? What do you need? I mean, from 1 AM, I think I was awake for 24 hours straight to trying to combat everything and get things back. People were on with me. That's what a hive does. And we know for a fact somebody else is struggling. We had a client a couple weeks ago, 10 o'clock on a Saturday night, reach out to their coach and say, hey, I'm struggling. And I said, hey, send them into body doubling, I'll be right there.

Yep.

Because our community means everything to us.

And if you join the community, that's what you're getting as well.

You're getting friends, you're getting people who actually care.

There—

we, we use AI for helping to write content in the background, but there is no AI used in our community at all because real human connection is what we need.

Yeah, I think, you know, in today's day and age, we're such a connected world, but we are so disconnected at the same time. And this is something that can best that. And literally, it's like, this is, this is an example of something that we built ourselves for ourselves because we needed it. And then we're like, hey, the whole world needs us. Let's make this happen. And that's when we started getting attacked.

And okay, if that's what it takes to reach more of my community, I'll do it. Whatever I have to do to make sure my community is getting the support they need. Is what we'll do. So, Tim, what is the thing you're looking most forward to right now that we're putting out there and getting ready to do?

Growing our community. I want more members. Like, we have 100% positive feedback for any member that joins our community.

Yeah, we have people that have joined and never shown up and never actually logged in, and they disappear because they didn't actually When you're neurodivergent, you sign up for something and then you forget about it. We understand that. We know that's there. We try to combat that as much as possible and get you on. But every single person who logs into one body doubling session, even if they only log in for 5 minutes, shows up to another one and continues to show up. Every single person. So if somebody signs in, I know that we have them trapped for life. They're part of the hive.

Exactly.

They are with us and it And they see so much benefit. I mean, we hear this every day. We had somebody who during our launch logged in, she logged in on the free trial at the $19.99 a month, and within 2 hours she, she asked me to shut that off so she could join in the lifetime founders.

Yeah, I saw that in real time. That was awesome. We, we have a lot of repeat stories like that.

We have 9 of those. We have 9 of those.

Yeah. So I, I just wanna duplicate that by the thousands.

Absolutely. And we have lifetime deals. So right now we have $39.99 a month. You can come in. If you come in and sign up on our website right now for the free Tuesday body doubling call, we have a free call. And if you show up to that call, I give you a link for 7 days free for NDI. But you have to come to that 2-hour session. You don't have to stay the whole entire 2 hours, but come in for that 2-hour session on Tuesdays. Sign up and you will get the link for a free 7-day trial of NDHive, and then you can either pay $39.99 a month or $250 one-time cost. We still have quite a few of those licenses left. Come in, join us, and that's $250. That's less than 7 months of paying for the $39.99 a month. I think somebody else did the math. I'm terrible at math. Don't ask me to do that.

Um.

But come join us. Just try it out. You can try it out for free for 7 days. Come try it out because that, again, 100% of people who come join us come join us.

Literally 100%.

So we hope you come join us. Um, if you've experienced feeling left out, feeling attacked, feeling frustrated by life, overwhelmed by every single thing in life, come join us because we can also help you with that.

Thanks. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.