Meta sent my startup a cease-and-desist.

In 2020 We launched TexAu. A LinkedIn and Facebook automation tool.

Within 6 months: 2,000+ daily active users. Millions of automations running.

We thought we’d made it.

We were building on rented land.

April 2023. We’d spent 2 years rebuilding everything from scratch. New UI, new backend, every automation rewritten. Launch date set. Team exhausted but excited.

Then this email showed up:

“Subject: Cease and Desist Abuse of Facebook and Instagram - TexAu”

Meta’s argument was simple:

They charge companies to run ads. We were helping those companies get targeting data from Groups, Profiles, and Pages for free.

We never scraped personal data. Didn’t matter.

When a $900B company sends lawyers, you don’t argue. You decide.

It got personal fast.

They disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Then my family’s accounts.

Then they blocked our entire website domain.

I spent months explaining. They promised to reactivate everything once we signed.

10+ accounts are still disabled today.

We signed. Removed 80+ automations overnight.

What was left: LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, website tools. Most of our customers were B2B. We still had LinkedIn. So we kept building.

Launched V2 in July 2024. It went well.

Then came round two.

July 17, 2025. LinkedIn sent a legal notice.

They wanted to take it to court.

We talked about it for days. The conclusion was the same no matter how we looked at it:

25 people. No VC. No legal war chest.

We had 10 days to respond.

I kept coming back to something my Dad told me: Whatever happens in life, you keep moving forward.

I grew up in the slums of Bombay in a 6x6 apartment.

Building something that hundreds of thousands of people use still feels unreal.

Giving up was never the option.

So we made one decision that changed everything:

We are not building on someone else’s land anymore.

We own the land this time.

V3 is not an update. It’s a completely different product on a completely different foundation.

What we built:

A GTM spreadsheet engine. You open a table, describe what you need, and the system builds the pipeline. Waterfall enrichment across 5 providers. AI columns that score and personalize. A co-pilot that turns plain English into outbound pipelines.

No LinkedIn dependency. No Facebook dependency.

The lesson I’d give any founder building on a platform:

You are renting. Every API call, every automation, every workflow - it exists because someone else allows it to exist.

Build on your own land. Even if it takes longer. Even if it’s harder.

Especially if it’s harder.