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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

Of course your friend would say this.

Said friend is a leading light in the tech/capital ecosystem and the opinion is rooted in long awareness of how much tech companies actually litigate and what the economic tradeoffs. Your dismissive reply is like dismissing a scientist/engineer for suggesting a technology company needs to keep investing in R&D if it aims to maintain a technical advantage over its competitors, and it's a pretty lazy comeback.

The DIY approach clearly didn't work out for the author of this article, who went from running a successful consumer product business to insolvency in the space of 18 months.

I didn't say your friend is wrong. As for "leading lights", looking at the state of tech and capital in general, there is really not much proper leading going on.

> The DIY approach clearly didn't work out for the author of this article, who went from running a successful consumer product business to insolvency in the space of 18 months.

Is that what happened here?

Many of the comments seem to indicate that "David" attempted to clone a product, but was out-cloned by others?

Would your legal friend be able to advise him on how to be more successful with his counterfeit product vs other counterfeits?

But his complaint is not that he was out-cloned, in the sense of his competitors gaining a greater market share because buyers preferred their product. His complaint is that his competitor repeatedly lied to Amazon about his products and theirs, in the former case making false claims that limited his access to the market, in the latter case securing favorable product categorizations for their own devices (classifying them as electronics instead of consumer goods and paying lower seller fees as a result). In short, his competitor went behind his back to the market operator with false information around 100 times.

Now maybe he's lying abut all this and has employed such tactics himself against others, but you haven't even addressed his claims.

Well.. he stated it was a clone right in the first sentence.

So when people filed claims against him on Amazon, how were they "false" given he acknowledged he is cloning someone else' product?

As others have posted, his story reads as follows:

- I found this great product on amazon

- I launched my own 'high quality' and "proprietary" version

- Others did the same thing

- someone failed complaints on amazon against me for my clone.

The rest of the stuff you outline fits with many other complaints here and why Amazon has "jumped the shark".

Speaking about addressing claims - Will your lawyer friend be able to help him with why his clone was removed from Amazon?

Again reading the posts, the single largest complaint people have on amazon is fraudulent clones, like what "David" made.

PS, his first run-on sentence just to save you the time from re-reading it.

"Our Amazon journey started in January 2018 when HyperVolt released the first massage gun on the market. We were so careful with this product that we began designing our patented design in February 2019 and launched our first massage gun on Amazon in July 2019; because our massage gun was unique and high-end, we began receiving a lot of 5-star reviews from the beginning, and we were Amazon’s best-seller from October 2019 to October 2021;"

As a friend in a tech industry, I tell all my friends to budget 50% of their revenue for tech investment and R&D. Oh and conveniently, I also have a company that can help them with these investments.

Seriously, don't swallow cock-and-bull statements like "legal should be 10% of your revenue". I remember years ago the landlord of my co-working space glibly told me that "as long as office rent is not more than 10% of your revenue you're good" in response to me pushing back to rent hike increases. Ridiculous conmen.

Except the friend isn't encouraging me to spend more in hopes of raising business. That's their comment on what existing companies typically spend on legal. Commercial and regulatory disputes are a fact of business life past a certain size.

Did you have a bad legal experience and think all lawyers are now out to get you or something? Conversely, do you think that not budgeting anything for legal expenses means your business will never be sued or need to sue anyone?

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