CEO details how YC-funded company Pebble copied them, word for word
Trending on Indie Hackers
Why would you NOT buy my product?
Why would you NOT buy my product?
Every company checks what its competitors are doing, it's something you have to do, so you can be ahead. But these guys took it way too far, impersonating YC partners while getting funded, taking a meeting, and asking questions about how everything works, it's just insane.
Impersonating YC founders?!... That's too far. How did they get away with this?
What I find especially shocking is their CTO, being an Eco user, took advantage of the 1:1 onboarding Eco offered. That feels almost personal. Also, says a lot about the need to protect your IP. Yes, transparency is an essential part of building trust, and I completely see the value in 1:1 onboarding, but where do you draw the line in terms of how much information you give away?
I get why founders would take an existing idea and launch one that builds or improves on it - but this is just an insultingly blatant copy.
Totally, there's not even an attempt to hide that fact. A lot of products that start out similar though, end up growing into distinctly different products as they each grow in their own direction. I wonder whether this was their intention. Perhaps they hoped nobody would notice until they had managed to differentiate themselves with time...risky business either way.
I think it's vital that the ecosystem close ranks to condemn this in a crystal clear way. This is the sort of destructive behavior that erodes trust throughout the system.
yeah this one was a really rough one to read. I think the rocket internet counter point put below was a good one, however
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on which side you are on) this sort of thing has happened forever.
The founders of Rocket Internet made their first millions creating a ripoff of ebay in their home country of German. Within the space of a few months ebay had bought them out for around $50 million if I remember correctly.
That was decades ago. Today its even easier (and cheaper) to copy features, benefits, etc. Nocode, cheap server costs, hosting etc.
Marc Benioff (founder of Salesforce) knew that his competitors would copy his innovative SaaS business model extremely quickly. As he says in his book beyond the cloud: A company can’t “own” its facts. If the company’s facts (speed, price, quality) are superior to the competition, any good competitor will duplicate them, or worse, improve upon them, as soon as possible.
As such, he focused on differentiating Salesforce with his brand (NO SOFTWARE).
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.