
The Copycats at Hacker News - DanielBMarkham
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/02/the-copycats-at.php
======
patio11
I have participated kinda heavily on HN and a few other Internet outlets for a
few years, and both of my software businesses have been cloned. BCC has been
cloned multiple times, including by one regular user of a forum I spent a lot
of time on, who is actually not lacking in savvy. I do not make a practice of
hiding the core tricks as to why BCC works, in fact, I have practically
written the complete business plan for cloning it five times and begged people
to start using the core tactics. BCC is, at risk of stating the obvious, not
the most technically challenging product.

My observations are as follows:

1) No clones have caused my business to fail.

2) It is _effing hard_ to convince people to rip off good ideas which require
non-trivial work or savvy. Heck, it's highly nontrivial to get them to "rip
off" those ideas when they pay five figures to have me write them down in a
strategy document or build the prototype myself and hand them the working
source code.

I mean, take A/B testing. I have said "A/B testing prints money" so many times
that some people are tired of hearing about it. Empirically, most of my
clients, many of whom have read my blog for years, do not A/B test before I
work with them. I talk to a lot of startups, some of whom are highly regarded.
Very few A/B test as a regular thing. The savviest guy who cloned me doesn't
bother A/B testing, either.

Please, good HN readers, "steal" that idea from me (or any of the numerous
other people you could steal it from, because I certainly stole it myself).
The last company I successfully convinced to actually do it NDAed me vis-a-vis
the impact. Let me hum a few bars: they offered to hire me at a quant's salary
to do it full-time. (Cheapskates.)

And yet when we check back on who A/B tests here in February 2013, do you know
what we're going to see? A few articles about it, with wise comments like "A/B
testing can only get you to a local maxima" and "Didn't we read an article
just like this on Smashing Magazine in 2006?", and fairly few companies who
actually have someone do it every week, even among the savvier folks.

P.S. Would love to be wrong about that.

~~~
euroclydon
People are often copying the wrong ideas. Why copy a reading list site or make
yet-another-alternative-HN-view site, when you could start a real business?

I find Patrick's posts and comments invaluable. He's made a real business
selling bingo cards to teachers. He pays contractors and venders thousands of
dollars per year.

He has this way of writing that makes what he does sound easy: "a SQL query
here, A/B test there, and whoopsie, I just made $35K."

I set out to copy BCC. I asked my wife, "Is there a software product you wish
existed, but doesn't?" She wanted a site where she can make custom cupcake
wrappers. So I set about making it. It's been nearly a year, and we're only
now over $200/month in revenue and +150 unique users per day. It's been a lot
of hard work, but along the way, interacting with customers, I realized
there's an opportunity to build a real business. We're about to buy a cutting
machine and custom dies so we can move from just selling PDFs to fulfilling
physical orders. Who knows, with all the emails I've collected, we may start a
selling custom web hosting for bakers and party planners.

So, I just want to say: by all means copy something. Clone someone's
successful website if you must, but copy their hard work. Copy their market
validation. Build a real business.

~~~
yirt
It's all about the zeros.

Simple fact: there are orders of magnitude more people in the world struggling
to use the most basic functions of Microsoft Word than there are people who
can write Hello World. Anything which makes tasks easier for people in group A
is valuable, even if it's already trivial for people in group B.

------
spacemanaki
I think I get the core idea of this post, but the title and opening are kinda
whiny and link baity, and that bugs me. Were there really lots of clones of
hn-bookes.com or were a lot of people just working on the same idea at the
same time? The latter happens pretty frequently, it seems, in all human
endeavors. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2249390>

I remember when hn-books.com launched, and I vaguely remember some of the
clones. None of them are that great. They all suffer from the same issues I've
had with other "organize your books" types of sites, with crappy UIs and
generally poor categorization and filtering. (What's JQuery in Action doing in
the FP section of hn-books? Where's Appel's compiler books in the compiler
section, and why isn't Lisp in Small Pieces there? etc... the site that was
announced in the Show HN post above suffers from the same issues)

I point out these flaws not to pick on DanielBMarkham's work, because it's a
decent site and I hope it's a success. But my point is, bring on the copycats!
If no one "copied" anyone else we'd be stuck with an awful lot of shitty first
attempts at things. I know this post was about these kinds of web businesses,
but in general think where we'd be without copies.

By all means, don't publish the recipe to your secret sauce, and don't do it
while you're still brewing it. But don't get pissy about these supposed hordes
of copycat programmers just waiting in the wings of HN.

------
ianbishop
I experienced something similar to this a few weeks ago. Except there were no
real copycats. A friend of mine and I had difficulty parsing the Who's Hiring
thread for just intern posts in SF. So we wrote a beautified, searchable
version of HN Who's Hiring (<http://supzu.cc>).

We hacked on it for about 2 weeks between classes. During that time, someone
wrote a beautified version of Who's Hiring with regex search. By the time we
posted it, there were several comments on the thread to the effect of 'I was
actually writing this'.

A similar situation took place in the last few weeks with Bootstrap theme-ing
websites. For each posted, there were a slew of 'No way! I've been working on
this too - see here'.

I don't necessarily think it's a matter of people copycating, per se. There is
a certain amount of emulation that can be seen. Consider when Path created a
unique menu that gained some attention on here. Within a week, numerous JS
clones were released. A week later, CSS3 complete clones started rolling out.

Overall, I think the story here is that you've got 100,000 users browsing HN.
Many of whom have similar skillsets and 'scratch your own itch' engrained in
their personalities. The result is often an almost autonomous convergence on a
few good ideas. I think this can be attributed to a sort of pidgeon hole
principle of code hungry hackers and a few obvious but good ideas.

This practice itself isn't really new. If you look at mathematics alone,
you'll find many things with multiple names or a concatenation of names. This
is usually because n people happened to all be working on it at the same time
without knowledge of each others advances. Sometimes ideas just seem to be 'in
the air' at a given point in time.

~~~
gwern
> Sometimes ideas just seem to be 'in the air' at a given point in time.

Yep. Multiple discovery: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery>
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2011-kelly-what-tech-
wants-c...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2011-kelly-what-tech-wants-
ch7.pdf)

------
jenius
Quote from the article:

So you set up your easel and get out your paints in front of a nice-looking
house and start to puzzle over how to start. Suddenly 500 other people all
arrive -- some of them who actually know how to paint -- and set up all around
you. Not only is it annoying, it's also distracting. And it can lead to a kind
of herd mentality where everything is attempted, but nothing is really tried.

This is called "competition" - you will find it everywhere you go. Is it
"annoying" and "distracting" that you are not the only one thinking about or
working on something? Maybe. But it will never happen that way in life. And
even if you are the only one and you finish your work, as soon as it's out and
someone sees it, they will copy you.

The way that you deal with competition is to _be better than everyone else_ \-
not seek a place where there's no competition. The approach this guy advocates
and the way he complains about competition is _not_ the way to approach
problems. If someone shows up at the house who actually knows how to paint and
you don't, it's time to bow out - you just lost. Practice up and come back
next time knowing how to paint.

~~~
geoffw8
You are not wrong, however, I think the you have maybe missed the main point
in the article which is yeah, competition is inevitable, but at least while
your getting started its probably best not to share your idea (yes, just an
idea) with a massive audience of hungry biz/coders/wannabe's/veterans and
instead keep things hush hush until your ready to put it out there.

------
geoffw8
While I'm happy discussing my "ideas" with most, I don't think discussing them
on an open forum such as HN (entrepreneurs, coders, wannabe's, veterans, the
lot) is a smart idea.

You wouldn't openly discuss a "oh my god I've just stumbled across x from
Ycorp" tip on the trading floor tea room now, would you?

That aside, I do agree it adds an unnecessary level of pressure. You know, the
thing is too, theres plenty more spaces out there.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
No you wouldn't. I agree.

There is a limit to this "ideas are worthless" theory. We don't talk about it
enough. Instead we either treat all ideas as precious or all as worthless. The
truth is much more nuanced than that.

I think people who are just getting started need to know and understand where
to draw the line -- and more importantly that other people are already drawing
the line in their public communications.

~~~
geoffw8
You are absolutely right. I used to be all about the ideas and think it was
all about ideas, it'll be hard to explain here in few words but I think ideas
are worthless up till a point.

Yeah, the startup process is heavily weighted towards execution, but if you
have a stellar idea - and let me just say when I say "idea" I really mean
"model" - then sure its got worth. If you know of a stone that nobody's
overturned, and hell there's plenty of them you should sure as shit sit on it
until you've got a flag ready that you can put in it.

But that only counts if its unique, if your going to build a "OMFG we have a
startup that lets you post a 200 CHARACTER status about how what your eating
makes you feel" then perhaps the idea might be "worthless" - because thats
clearly a business that will make or break in its execution.

So yeah, I agree.

~~~
onemoreact
I think more generally ideas are worthless incite is not. If you think of
Twitter in terms of message length you completely miss many reasons it was
such a good idea. Twitter is a useful self-promotion tool for people who will
promote it for free. Creating a public message stream large enough and
companies will pay to listen in. Let third party's create interfaces and you
don't need to pay to send SMS messages.

They could have build a vary different company using similar incites with a
completely diffident idea and been just as successful, but realizing the cost
of really large scale SMS messaging was not prohibitive was brilliant.

------
drats
I have to say that I'm not taken with the whole "share your startup idea, tell
everyone who will listen" for the reasons outlined in this article. My main
project, if it succeeds, will be a lifestyle business. As I have a job I can't
execute as quickly, if I went around detailing the idea then I am certain
someone could beat me to realizing it. Now while I have cross domain skills
which mean mine will be better, that's not 100% certain: so why would I share?

Sharing your ideas in many cases I think is a bad idea. With all due respect
to Patrick, who has commented elsewhere on this thread, one data point from
the niche of Bingo Card Creators (old people referring by word of mouth?)
doesn't match up with the high level of clones I see on HN every month.

------
jacquesm
Copycats don't matter at all. All that matters in the long run is stamina, and
no copycat will have that. All they'll ever want is a quick buck, some way to
copy the success without the hard work. It is _never_ going to work so don't
worry about it.

And if a copycat has more stamina than you do then maybe you picked the wrong
business. Really, don't worry about people copying you, take it for what it
is: flattery.

------
jfornear
If short-term copycats are threats to your business, you're business must have
no plan and a death wish.

~~~
dmils4
well said.

~~~
dmils4
I think I understand why this was downvoted - didn't know this wasn't ok. Now
I know.

Only reason I mentioned this is that it brought the essence of the article out
in one sentence (tl;dr).

Please either delete my comment, let me delete my original comment, or stop
downvoting me. What's the point in downvoting someone repeatedly? I'm not sure
how the system works on your end (or if you can see how many others have
downvoted), but seems pretty harsh to keep doing this when there was an honest
mistake. Thanks.

------
gadders
I remember reading an interesting article by Eric Sink once:
<http://www.ericsink.com/articles/Game_Afoot.html> which I think is semi-
relevant.

====

The thing I find most interesting about Ping Pong is that you can often win
without doing anything fancy or aggressive. A lot of players think the way to
win is to slam the ball really hard. The problem with this strategy is that a
slam is a high-risk/high-reward shot. If you do it right, you almost certainly
score a point when your opponent fails to return the ball. If you do it wrong,
you give your opponent a point.

Modesty aside, I consider myself a "pretty good" Ping Pong player. I can slam
the ball when necessary, but I hardly ever do. I can beat most other players
by simply returning every shot with a little backspin. Hitting the ball hard
simply isn't necessary. All I need to do is wait for the other player to make
21 mistakes.

====

So even if you have competitors if you execute in a better fashion than they
do, and don't f--- up, you can still be the most successful business.

------
jcr
Daniel, the point of your article is generally sound, but you omitted an
important point, motivation.

When you see a clone of hn-books or bingo card creator or some other idea,
you're assuming the motivation for it is profit, and you're assuming the goal
is to create a business.

Your assumptions may often be correct, in fact, your assumptions may be
correct in the majority of cases, but unfortunately, they are not always
correct. You are too focused on "work," "effort," "skill," "business," and
"profit" to see the less obvious and more idealistic side of things.

The less obvious side is, fun.

The greatest hackers I've known just love coding. They do it for fun. Many are
obsessive enough to use a pedal bike to power their CVS/GIT server if that was
the only way to keep it running. The challenge, problem, or idea is mostly
irrelevant. Though nearly everyone enjoys having their accomplishments
recognized by others, it's not a competition for attention, recognition,
profits, or anything else.

Great hackers often have the luxury of waking up, getting a cup of coffee, and
scratching whatever itch suits their current fancy. All programmers suffer
from the planning fallacy, or more accurately, an over-abundance of optimism.
When they see a challenge, their only reaction is, "I can do that!" regardless
if there is any realistic truth in their statement. --HN is filled with
interesting challenges.

The thing is, the fun is in trying. Whether or not they "succeed" or "fail"
matters very little since all the fun is had in just trying. It's also fun to
watch other people try, and learn from the lessons they have learned through
trying. Programming is not a spectator sport, but learning from the efforts of
others is as close as we'll get without actually writing some code of our own,
and possibly contributing it back to those we've been watching.

I suspect at least some portion of the clones are merely people who said, "I
can do that!" and for fun, gave it a try. The idea of sincerely competing in a
business sense never crossed their minds as they fired up their favorite text
editor and started having some fun.

If the challenge that I found interesting and fun today was writing an ebook
on being a ScrumMaster, I'd enjoy my attempt at writing one. We both know my
results would undoubtedly suck compared to yours, but it would still be fun
for me, even though the result would still be yet another bit of competition
for you.

The above was a poor example, but I wanted to point out how the "fun for me"
can also be "harmful for you," even when no harm is intended. It's quite
similar to people who drive too fast, or in the opinion of law enforcement,
drive faster than allowed or faster than is safe. Some of the "fun" people
have is inconsiderate and harmful.

------
tucosan
_When the community discussed the need to have some app to strip websites of
all the annoying visual garbage on them, wham! A bunch of different really
cool sites do that now._

Does anbody know what he is referring to? Does he simply mean instapaper,
readability and the likes, or are there some other interesting solutions out
there?

------
jrockway
If you write software and people clone it, it's because you're not supporting
the community correctly. Maybe it's because nobody can hack on your source
code, or maybe your code sucks and nobody wants to work on it. Maybe you don't
accept ideas and patches quickly enough. Maybe people don't like talking to
you. Maybe it's just randomness.

Basically, software people like writing software, but often don't have a
project that really excites them. Reading about something on HN gives them the
inspiration to take that idea and implement it themselves.

So yes, if you're making a weekend project that is nothing special and don't
want anyone to use, don't talk about it here because someone else will
reimplement it. But if you look at complicated things that make money, like
Flickr or YouTube, you don't see a lot of people cloning those because it's
not as easy.

~~~
citricsquid
> it's because you're not supporting the community correctly > Maybe it's just
> randomness

The latter part of your comment is completely correct, "software people like
writing software" and that's often why they clone good ideas, the first part
of your comment contradicts this. It has nothing to do with "supporting the
community", people build their own versions of open source software all the
time.

~~~
jrockway
Sorry about that; I edited out a specific example.

search.cpan.org was the default interface to the CPAN for many years. The
author didn't share the code and did't really take suggestions from the
community, and so it got forked and is now gone. Nobody _wanted_ to fork and
rewrite the software -- it was good enough -- but the author wouldn't play
ball with his users. Now everyone uses MetaCPAN.

------
unreal37
My gut reaction to this is that real businesses are hard to copy. If you look
at the most successful online businesses of the last 10 years (Facebook,
Google, Zynga, Linkedin), none of them have had successful copies.

But if you - in an afternoon or a long weekend - create a web site as a small
project, expect a lot of people to do that too. Some do it for fun, and some
may actually be serious about competing with you. But if you have passion for
it, and they don't, it won't matter.

I look at the stuff Patrick does (BCC), and it looks kinda hard to really
copy. He's open about his processes, challenges, and all the work he put into
it (particularly marketing and generating repeat business). I may be bold
enough to say it's easy to copy the technology and hard to copy the business.

------
formosa
Great article. I've found myself doing this in the past. I'd tell people how
and what I did but there's always an unexpected turn that happens. I leave out
that bit because its something I earned through sweat and tears when talking
about how I did something.

But, sometimes I just let it all hang out because I know that there's no
possible chance for someone to copy my efforts.

The few businesses that are easily copied are usually short term projects
because sooner or later everyone finds out the secret. The best projects I've
done are the ones where I'm going full open kimono because there's something
about my personal network, skill set or etc that gives me an inherent
advantage over everyone else.

Best examples are my personal connections to marketing firms and my
professional licenses.

------
AznHisoka
While copycats shouldn't be a threat to your business model - they can lead to
more unnecessary noise in the PR side. It's hard to pitch someone to write an
article about your business when they've heard the same idea 100 times.

------
ericHosick
A competing company was manufacturing a product: let's call it A. We talked
about creating a new product B. We asked existing customers what they thought
about product B.

We realized that product B would not be a good seller and did not invest any
money in it. However, the competing company somehow finds out about the plans
and invested a lot of money to get product B out the door before we could
(even though we had let the idea fall to the side).

They lost a lot of money and it helped us gain additional market share with
the original product A.

Note: I only had a small part in this company but makes it easier to write the
story with "We".

------
melvinmt
If your business can simply be cloned by just reading comments on the internet
about it, your business is not that great to begin with.

------
eichin
My question is - is anyone _gaming_ it. For example, were I to suggest that I
was working on "InstaPaper for PDFs... with kindle sync and an ipad app" how
quickly would I hear about other "copycat" versions with crowdsourced
recommendations or lulu tie-ins or some other variation?

(I'm not _actually_ working on one. Really. _looks at watch_)

------
tluyben2
> It's the ultimate in ADHD money-making. Crap + Code + Conversions = money.

I would say this is correct IF you have a mailing list to peddle this
'product' to; a lot of internet millionaires are working exactly like that.
They create some crappy product and get their list to buy and sell it.

~~~
AznHisoka
I know someone who built a list of 2000 or so people who buy this weight loss
product every single month. He sends them all a coupon newsletter every month.
it took him 2-3 years to build that list. 2000 ppl doesn't sound like a lot,
but keep in mind the conversion rate is HUGE, and he gets a 20% cut. He makes
around $20000 a month in affiliate revenue.

------
kstenerud
The problem here is not with the audience, but rather with the speaker.

Daniel, you shouldn't even be worried about the copycats; they're not your
true audience. Those 500 people who show up to paint the same house as you?
They're not your true disciples. They'll play around getting paint on
themselves for a week tops and then move on to the next shiny thing. The 3-4
who stay? THOSE are your disciples.

So go ahead. Shout from the rooftops. Share your ideas. The copycats will
slavishly praise the good advice, will implement it poorly, and then move on.
And the 2-3 people who actually understand you, take your advice to heart, and
with diligence and patience implement it will love you forever.

Ideas are not the only diamonds in the rough; people are as well, and only
diamonds can recognize diamonds. Don't bemoan by the vastness of the rough.
Celebrate the rare diamonds you find instead.

------
swalsh
In my experience, I've noticed that successful competitive advantages don't
come from features. That's because anyone can implement a feature.

------
squarecat
This is far from a new phenomenon: look at the early days of the automobile up
to today's KIRF iPhones.

------
alain94040
I stand by "people copy success, not ideas."

All ideas are stupid until proven successful. By then, copying is too late.

~~~
joyceaskyadl
Its quite true .. for lots of time .. we are extracting ideas about the
success not the full original idea!

------
coderdude
This article hits close to home. Two points:

* On copycats: When I release something on HN I get a couple tweets or private emails where the sender basically tells me "hey, I'm going to copy your idea/site/layout/whatever. Just thought you should know." Which is fine because I don't think anything I've done is uniquely original. It is a little weird though to get a heads-up each time.

* I am _incredibly candid_ in my communications about my projects ("startups"). I enjoy the transparency. It makes for a good learning experience, both for others and myself. Lately I've been extra-transparent, though I'm starting to get a feel for when it's time to reel it in.

So, thanks for this -- it really made me sit and think about how I should take
care not to divulge something that is key, even if it seems obvious to me.
Others might not have found it so obvious or would not have pursued it if they
hadn't been handed the answers.

------
marshallp
The solution to that is to put a lot more ideas out. There really isn't a
shortage of ideas, only a shortage of people to implement them.

The problem then becomes that some ideas might not turn a profit fast enough.

The solution to that is to use the fake landing page method or the
kickstart/indiegogo to have the market decide for you what to build.

------
eytanlevit
Welcome to capitalism

