
Beware of being too open about your company on Hacker News - jacquesm
http://jacquesmattheij.com/Beware+of+being+too+open+about+your+company+on+Hacker+News
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tptacek
This reads like personal drama in the form of a blog post. I didn't learn
anything from it about how I should comport my company on HN, but the title
pretty much demanded I click through. Irritating.

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jacquesm
Suggested changes ?

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absconditus
Do not write about inane topics with a lack of insight.

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jacquesm
The insight to me is that if you post your turnover figures there will be
people right here that will not even blink at cloning your pages to copy your
concept.

That's news to me. If you think that's 'inane' that's fine with me but I think
the insight is a valid one.

To me that says that there are lurkers on HN that are here with no other
purpose than to look for stuff they can rip off.

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patio11
Clones are great, since you look at what they copied and then know what your
competitive advantage wasn't. Ever heard of my clones? There are about half a
dozen by now. Life is still going great for me.

~~~
jacquesm
I think the good news here is that they're all unable to hit that fine line
that Zachary knew how to strike and for him it might not matter much, but
start-ups can be vulnerable and being 'open' may not be the right approach.

Especially if it looks like you are sitting on a real moneymaker. Zachary is
going for subscribers and at the rate it's growing the turnover of
awesomenessreminders might well be in the hundreds of thousands before long.
That sort of success is bound to bring the vultures in larger numbers than
what bingo-card-creator would experience, with the combined pressure of so
many jackals it might become a real problem.

After all, if you're the #1 in the field and you're making as much as you do
it can't be too lucrative for your competition to be fighting over the
remainder of the market, but how do you think it would develop if you made a
million or more per year? I'm fairly sure the competition would heat up quite
a bit.

By the way, I think you have a great thing going with opening up your figures
like that, for the last week or so I've been see-sawing back and forth about
doing the same thing, I'm not yet 100% convinced it's the way forward (but I'm
a lot less vulnerable than Zachary at this point in time).

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sunir
Here's a rule you have to get used to:

There is never just one of a thing on the Internet. There are twelve.

Clones are par for the course. Once in a while the clones win, but not very
often. They definitely keep you on your toes. Plus you can steal ideas back
from them as well. They are kind of like your personal farm league.

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icey
If someone creates a site that makes money and can be cloned in a few hours of
work, of course people are going to copy it.

Isn't that why investors want to know what the competitive advantage is with
any company they're going to invest in? To prevent this sort of copy-catting?

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alexophile
A good point, but I think it's a simple distillation from two more important
points: 1) Your business can be cloned; if it's any good, it will be - count
on it. 2) Always always always be careful about what you put on the internet.
If someone complains about their business idea being stolen after posting it
online, they sound like the high school girl who can't fathom why her ex-
boyfriend would put the naked pictures she sent him on the internet. Those
were supposed to be _private_.

PS: Here's a fun thought. If you have recently had or are soon going to have a
daughter, you are going to have to, at some point, teach her about not
distributing naked pictures of herself. I doubt it's as bad an epidemic as TV
makes it out to be, but you can bet the bank her health teacher isn't gonna
touch that with a 10ft pole.

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il
I think these clones are taking the concept way too far...having a total
stranger call you every day saying "I miss you and I love you" is creepy and
deranged.

EDIT: It gets worse. Who would want to receive a random phone call of "I want
to nibble on your nuts"?

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moe
Personally I don't even understand why people want a useless phonecall _every
day_. It might be funny the first few times, but would that wear off rather
rapidly for me.

However, if there's really a market for a "nut nibble" call-service, I don't
see anything creepy or deranged in providing it. There's surely much creepier
and more deranged things out there...

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lukeqsee
I'm not sure how posting on HN actually does anything more for these clones.
The idea is obvious. The text is _there_.

What stops any Joe from doing the same?

Obviously it's just dumb, stupid, and unprofessional to copy from a fellow
HNer, but I don't see how it gives them any boost.

Thoughts?

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jacquesm
I think it's the fact that Zachary has been very open about his growth and
turnover that brings this on, not the idea per se.

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retube
I'm not sure what the "openness" is that is being referred to here. It just
seems that various people took a quite simple idea, and copied it. Short of
not telling people about your business, how are you going to stop this?

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jacquesm
I think the big draw here is the money involved, not the concept per se.

When Zachary launched this was the general sentiment:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616154> but then it took off and people
started literally _copying_ his website to clone it.

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ww520
The clones are basically letting Zachary do the market research and the
initial minimum viable product development to validate a concept before
jumping in. Since Zachary releases a lot more market data, he just saves the
clones whole bunch money.

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jhrobert
1/ There is full credits to the original in the clones.

2/ The clones are better looking than the original

3/ I am assuming the whole thing is a farce

But, who knows, maybe clones work, let's try, says, a wiki, looks like a good
weekend project <http://simpliwiki.com>

As alreay signaled (by stevederico)

Ideas are worth nothing, , execution and timing are everything.
<http://thenextbigtechthing.com/ideas-are-worth-nothing/>

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jacquesm
> There is full credits to the original in the clones.

There is now, yes: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694596>

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jhrobert
That they had to be reminded about credits tells something.

OTOH, that they added the credits tells something too.

This is so Darwinish!

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jacquesm
> OTOH, that they added the credits tells something too.

Yes, that guy had been called out earlier for ripping off content from
apple... it tells me he didn't learn much.

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stevederico
Ideas are worth nothing, execution and timing are everything.
<http://thenextbigtechthing.com/ideas-are-worth-nothing/>

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hariis
Let me ask this way, What did Zachary gain by putting the numbers out?

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jacquesm
I think it helped to make people see that it was a 'valid business' and that
in turn got him quite a bit of press I believe.

As a 'bootstrapper' it can be a lot harder to get press than with a company
like YC behind you.

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hariis
I thought he got press coverage (Time) prior to his posting the numbers. I
believe that, other than telling others that it is a 'valid business',
announcing those numbers did not achieve anything useful for him.

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jacquesm
Ok, that may be true. I thought the membership counter was on the homepage
right from day one, but I may be mistaken.

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zackattack
it was on the homepage from day 1. i recently removed it. i thought that it
would be a good social proof counter and all my friend enjoyed keeping track
of how it was growing. the site started out as a fun thing that happened to be
profitable. i had no idea that it would grow like it did.

i want to continue sharing information among the community, but it's pretty
weird that those guys straight up jacked my style without even emailing me. i
honestly don't know how i'm going to proceed.

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omouse
This is the paradox of capitalism. As things become cheaper, they become more
like a commodity.

These clones of ideas are simply turning that idea into a commodity and aside
from some minor surface changes, they're really the same. The competition
created is fairly artificial.

Instead of thinking of it as a rip off, think of it as a way to improve your
own commodity offering.

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minalecs
you should think of it as validation, if someone is willing to use their time
to clone the product. Its mainly about execution, getting users, and building
something people want, just building a product now and days can be done fast,
cheap, and easy.

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jacquesm
Validation is one thing, but cutting and pasting whole pages of text goes a
bit further than that.

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Poiesis
If a clone proceeds to take all your business, I would suggest that perhaps
your business model was not sustainable.

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bretthellman
You don't see that as a complement?

