Hi, Thanks for commenting, and for your work on Footpath. I hadn't seen it before, I'll be downloading it now. You have stumbled across one of 'problems that

Hi, Thanks for commenting, and for your work on Footpath. I hadn't seen it before, I'll be downloading it now. You have stumbled across one of 'problems that many startups rarely address'. I've been involved with several startups and heard hundreds of pitches; and as somebody naturally focused more on the product side, I always get stung when a more pragmatic (i.e. money-orientated - usually an investor) person says "you'll be crushed as soon as you succeed!". The simple fact is that as soon as a small service invents a product or feature, and shows that it works (such as your app), the big fish are going to ask themselves "which is cheaper: copying the feature, or buying you out?" As you have no patents, it is naive to think that Strava (or any company) would feel any "ethical" (as you said in your article) qualms about copying you. They had an engineering team look at it (as your server logs show), and report that they could probably copy the feature in a few months i.e less money than they thought it would take to buy you out. > The issue as I see it is that Strava is being misleading in saying they came up with an idea themselves and can innovate quickly, when in fact the data shows otherwise. What possible reason would they have for doing otherwise? In the quotes you chose in your post, there are no explicit lies - they don't claim to have invented it, they just say they "came up with the idea for the mobile version". Why would they promote another service needlessly? I admire you for having created a great product, which I will undoubtedly use. But if you want to create a great business in the future, think from day 1 about how to protect yourself for when it gets successful.