My Friend Stole My Ideas and Hired Someone Else [Traffic Talk]

My friend’s “uncle” owns a business that refurbishes boats. It’s a great little company that makes good money, but their website was straight out of 1998. I asked the friend of a friend about this and he mentioned that he was losing business to a competitor who was doing “that whole tweeting and facebook stuff” but admitted he knows nothing about social media or any internet strategy.

Because I’ve always liked the guy and because I have the time, I offered to make him a new site, including domain name and hosting as long as he needed, as well as get him tied in with social and even teach him how to use it all for a pretty damn low amount. I’d break even on it, but it would look good in my portfolio and I’d be helping out a friend of a friend.

I met a couple of times with him and his partner, and went over ideas they had. I brought up a few of my own that he loved. We basically verbally hashed the whole thing out. I told them I could start on it June 1st.

Tonight I met up with my friend for coffee, and off-handedly he mentioned that they’re going with some vendor that the partner knew. I called up the friend of the friend and he verified that they’re taking all my ideas and my offer and gave it to the other guy to see if he could “beat my estimate”. He didn’t, but the partner overruled him and decided to go with the other guy because he’d worked with him before.

So, basically, I brought to their attention that they were leaving money on the table and offered to fix it for the for a very low cost, and they took my ideas and gave them to another developer to do the work for them.

In the end I don’t lose anything, but I had turned down some work in June to accommodate them. Am I unreasonable for being pissed off, or do I have a real reason to be upset? Why does this seem so personal? Will whiskey help me deal with my feelings of impotent rage?