Inspiration vs. Imitation | Hacker News Reader

Inspiration vs. Imitation

cushionapp.com

193 pointssinak26 comments

A similar thing happened to me years ago. I had a project that surprisingly became a bit popular and there were two competitor projects that ripped on the work.

The first one ripped our entire site and simply changed all the texts slightly, and also the look of our system. But, it was oddly different code - why copy the look completely (including our graphics) if you are going to write a new system?

The second one, done by a somewhat semi-famous person at the time, copied our minimal, custom forum. I have no idea how much work that must have been to port Vanilla to look like ours. Friends asked me if I had joined their team which is how I found out.

I never publicly said anything which chewed me up for a really long time. Both of those projects failed long ago. A copycat likely also won't know how to do other things for themselves and you can bet that they won't know how to execute their project when things get serious.

Cushionapp, you're doing it right. Make your app as innovative and unique as you can and just keep doing your thing. Never bother looking at their site/app again...

I've also had the same experience on my second product. Someone made an off-brand copy of about 18 months of work (testing marking, making prototypes, etc) right down to cloning my client libraries and removing all attribution. It was gut wrenching at first.

I couldn't agree more with your last point. Keep doing what you're doing - but more specifically, focus on solving the problem you have identified and studied. Chances are that you understand the needs of your market better than the copycats. In my case, the ability to meet the needs users trumped my copycats ability to copy my progress.

I don't know you, but damn do I admire the way you responded.

Total class act, told your perspective with passion, and took the total right positioning for a new platform looking to side with freelancers (people so often taken advantage of in the startup eco-system).

Well done, and best of luck.

I'll agree with the others here - you've shown an exceptional attitude in dealing with this situation. I'm rooting for your app to do really well.

As an aside, this is first time I visited the blog and I have to say that the way you've been open about the product development & expenses[0] is truly amazing. Just by skimming over the list, I found a couple of great tools that I could use for my projects. When (if?) I ever build a SAAS app, your blog is where I'm coming straight back to.

> but this community is built on sharing what we know.

Thank you for living up to this. You, my friend, are doing a great service to the community. Wishing you all the best.

[0] - http://cushionapp.com/expenses/

Superb strategy with the post - I've to applaud for that. Personally, after that email exchange, I would have made a personal visit with a baseball bat, seriously. I hope somebody posts the competitor's name so we can all publicly shame them in social media which will show up in the search engine rankings so anybody considering them will be directed to Cushion instead of rewarding those asshats.

You clearly confused HN with /b/.

If he wants to act on it, he should send them a letter written by a lawyer.

Oh yes, very good strategy for a startup fighting against another startup. I'm sure a letter written by a lawyer will be effective at least in draining Cushion's bank account. Unfortunately in cases like these Cushion doesn't have legally much to go on because it's not super unique design. Only reasonable course of action is to raise awareness and he chose to do that. He also chose to do that without naming the competitor which is of course very classy and smart from Cushion's point of view but does very little for Cushion as a whole. This is a great opportunity to play the competitor out of the market by turning their lust for shortcuts against themselves. Proper way to "return the favor" to the competitor is to get other people telling others about it.

It sucks, but if all that it does take is for someone to copy some visual aesthetic to have parity then there's an issue with the business. It's a good opportunity to think about the value outside of the parts that are easily copied.

As a side note, I'm sure they have copied parts of your app, but the date picker probably isn't a good example. I saw it and thought it looked like my app, as I'm using a modified bootstrap date picker.

If it helps, try to consider the incident as it struck me: you did top-notch work, really polished it up to offer your customers a quality of experience pretty much unparalleled in your market, and witnessed the disheartening collateral damage of having inspired the wholly uninspiring.

The off-brand stuff just never tastes quite right. If they were genuinely so immature about the confrontation, they're not going far. Keep on keepin' on.

It is classy of you to have not revealed the name of the offender. You show lot of dignity and I am sure it will pay off.

I'd like to know what this other app's name is, so I can absolutely never even consider using it.

It's the one that looks like Cushion. ;)

If the story's true the best retribution would be to not give the competitor any visits.

I'm really damn curious myself but you're absolutely right on this one. At least we know what the competitors site looks like :D

A great response, and wholly appropriate. If success rides on having an interface that no one has ripped off then your startup is going to be very fragile and quite likely to fail, because like it or not, as soon as you get any noticeable traction people will copy what you're doing. That doesn't make copying OK but it's a reality that startup founders face. Startups work when the founders and employees build innovative solutions to problems, and react to customer feedback to make the solution better and better. Anyone copying you is only ever going to be in second place in that regard, so you have an inherent advantage over them. Make the most of it.

Without seeing a lot more context, I think it's believable that this is indeed just the result of using Bootstrap.

Originality is vanishingly rare (if it exists at all, which I sometimes doubt), and it's certainly possible for multiple parties to independently end up with very similar designs, especially if those parties are all using common underlying tools.

"I visited the Twitter page to reach the people behind it when my heart sunk even deeper—I recognized them.

They were Cushion beta users.

Aside from feeling sick, I felt betrayed. Not only because they were Cushion users, but because I remembered answering numerous questions they had about how I built parts of the app. I was naive to assume they were just curious developers, but this community is built on sharing what we know."

In this context I'd say it's not coincidental.

People will copy a good product almost anytime. It's "easy to do", but the thing is that they can't copy the drive to innovate the market, which is way any good product was built in the first place. If he keeps innovating like he already did with Cushion, the copy will just sit there without value, and that's the price for being an imitator.

He (the owner of Cushion) also handled everything perfectly. It would be easy to just be shouting about the cloning, this is a really great answer that should let us learn a bit. With hatred he would have gotten on the bad side of the game. With a post like this, he stayed on the good side and also earned a bit of traffic ;)

Awesome.

I did have a friend wanting to jump into programming and came asking for advice. Later came back with a website copied and edited from another friend's website, proud.

Some people just don't understand how much time and love is poured into the design and code. Being inspired by something/someone doesn't mean you can just imitate.

Don't give up! Really admire how you kept things calm and clean.

Copying and modifying is a sensible way to learn. Doesn't mean you should ever pass it off as your own, but there's value in understanding how something else works by poking at it. Then throw it away and write your own, or find an appropriate Open Source project to work from.

I do agree that it is a sensible way to learn, just that they shouldn't take credit for it. I totally don't mind poking into stuff, it just means the original work is awesome and there're stuff to learn from it. However, there's always been the problem of taking credit away from the original creators, acting like its all yours to begin with.

I just signed up because of the tone of your response and because this looks like something we've been in need of for a long time. Looking forward to getting access to the beta!

I'm sorry; I don't see it. I've seen hundreds of date pickers and color pickers and alerts, and they look very similar. The visual design language of the web co-evolves across millions of sites. There are only just so many ways these things can be done. I prefer to have a web filled with familiar, usable components, rather than every designer trying to make the same control somehow novel.

Unless these folks wholesale copied your html and CSS source code, I don't think you need be getting upset about it. The "look and feel" cases between Apple and Microsoft settled this issue in the 90's - it's not protectable.

"Look and feel" aside, the site copy (i.e. text content) is way too similar to be a coincidence.

Ur app looks interesting. I just signed up :).

Also, I like the breakdown of your expenses. It's good for other people to learn from too.

> Twitter Bootstrap scaled down would look the same

If I had a dollar...

who is the competitor?

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