It's very hard to accept criticism; very hard. But OP's view is the mature, thoughtful way to go about it. Some people are going to be mad-as-hell, and they just will be. The analysis and advice is good. The initial response from the founder wasn't great and because we all like rooting for the underdog, there was a pile-on. Bad on us.

But, just to see how accepting criticism works, it wasn't Dostoevsky who had that quote about happy families, it was Tolstoy. :-)

Shorter: "Don't take it personally". Also, people tend to dial down their flamethrowers once they see that you're listening.

OP is wrong, ad hominem is the best way to both defend your intellectual integrity and also drive engagement

The underrated trick here is separating “signal” from “status game.” Even hostile reviews often contain one actionable invariant (“this workflow is brittle”, “pricing feels dishonest”), and the rest is just the reviewer performing for an audience. If you respond only to the invariant (and maybe ask one concrete follow-up), you de-escalate without rewarding the theatrics — and you also create a public artifact future users can trust.

    We have more users than everyone you just mentioned (combined).

That's my favorite part. When an organization dominates a market, it's possible that they're so much better than the competition that the market has full-force chosen them, but that's almost never the case. Usually, it's because they've managed to avoid an open market all-together, (e.g. through exploiting intelectual property protection, byzantine compliance requirements, exclusive contracts made without concern for end users, etc…) and there's no need to make the product good, making it far worse than all of the competition (combined).

In my experience, haters are some of the most passionate users, if you can do even the smallest thing to demonstrate a desire to improve, they'll often be huge advocates over the medium term.

I was working at a startup and we got some frustrating and hostile feedback from a user, I responded by acknowledging the issue and sending them a beta build that attempted to fix their issue. (it did not, but...)

Just reaching out and trying to engage made an enormous difference. They ended up contributing significantly to isolating and fixing that specific bug and others in the future, and referring us a few customers to boot, if I remember correctly.

Frustration is the fuel for innovation.

Meh, CEOs response was bad, but I hate people with a burning passion when they express feelings like that about a product. Just stop using it and walk away and stop making it harder for other people to live. If you want to offer feedback then lead with that.

“Claude gets it”

No. It does not. It does not understand anything. Stop anthropomorphizing bots!

I find the things I hate the most are the things that I want to like. What I hate specifically is the disappointment of seeing ‘bad’ when I expect ‘better’

I work in a big company where everyone knows how to "accept criticism". What they don't know is how to fix the problems. The company here had a tweetfest, then a blogfest, then an apology fest. Did they even consider sitting down with a glass and looking at the product?

The fake apology at the end makes this quite funny. "I was just protecting the team". "I learned many lessons". Etc. Good at marking this as a company to avoid.

Even the CEO's "apology" is pretty bad. He still finds a way to take shots at the original poster saying his original message was inflammatory (could also be read as how I'm justified in my response), that "he started it" and that the team was "spoken down to or treated dismissively" which they weren't. All the original feedback was about the project and was not directed at specific individuals.

Harjot's initial feedback reminds me of one of my pet peeves:

If I reach out and say "I love that your product does X & Y, but it would be helpful if it also did Z", please don't reply with "Nobody needs Z."

Tell me you will look into it, or it's out of scope, or hard to implement, or literally anything other than calling me a nobody.

Complaints are amazing! I've said for years that you know you're succeeding when people start complaining. Complaints are a sign that users see something potentially valuable, and are frustrated that they can't get there. Even if you can't prioritize the fixes that would be required, you should still embrace them.

I often read reviews of places and things I'm even tangentially interested in. As a user, there's little more unprofessional to me than a company replying to negative reviews with anything but an apology, or offer to help or do better.

So many places, especially local ones, take every sub five star review as an insult and invitation to argue. I'm actually shocked by the percentage of places that do this. It drives away my business, and I can't be the only one.

Even not replying at all is a better strategy, IMO.