8 ms·

The Copycats at Hacker News

207 points by DanielBMarkham 15y ago

geoffw8 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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.
  - 16s 15y ago
    Isn't this sort of counter to open source and free software and the tools that many of us use daily? I mean half the tools we use are free and given away. Ruby, Linux, gcc, etc. What if the guys behind those projects never shared their ideas or gave things away for free? I mean it seems sort of hypocritical. I hope this doesn't come off as negative, but it just struck me that way.
    - o1iver 15y ago
      The difference is that those people never intended to make money of those projects. Or at least not directly (Red Hat).
  - getsat 15y ago
    http://sivers.org/multiply http://sivers.org/multiply
- formosa 15y ago
  An interesting exercise would be to leak your idea just to see how everyone fails or succeeds while you build your own version. This would obviously only work if you had an inherent advantage in the market though haha.
  - DanielBMarkham 15y ago
    That's the hell of the thing, as the article points out: you'll never know what you screwed up. Yes, it'd be great if you could have 100 people all starting from the same point and everybody learning the lessons of what worked and what didn't because of total openness, but that's just not happening. Instead you'll get 2 or 3 survivors writing blog articles about how awesome their startup is without actually reporting anything at the level of detail you'd need to actually improve.
formosa 15y ago
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.
jenius 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
- ed209 15y ago
  I agree with the sentiment of your comment, but being better than everyone else is not enough [1]. I'm sure there a lots of better alternatives to things you use in your life, but you're not using them because you never heard of them (marketing) or it never got to market (bad financial management) or many other areas where that better product got beaten. [1] I'll take better than everyone in this case to mean better at painting and not better at everything.
- temphn 15y ago
  But what if you are better than everyone else at coming up with ideas, but slower at executing (say in the 90th rather than the 99th percentile)? Just as in mathematics, solving a problem vs. simply checking that the solution is right do not have the same degree of difficulty.
patio11 15y ago
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.
- DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  I don't know, Patrick. I've long been an "you can shout your idea from the rooftops and it won't matter" guy for a long time. All I'm trying to do here is point out that this isn't a blanket rule. Or at least I've stopped believing that it is. I think people see statements like yours and believe there is no tiny idea about execution that will generate immediate positive results if copied. But that's demonstrably not true. In fact, thousands of folks are chasing just such a thing. Folks know this instinctively. Perhaps nobody cares that much about the large concept of selling bingo cards or the broad hunk of small details it takes to make that happen? Perhaps if I describe in detail how to make 2K a month -- and it takes a huge amount of effort over a year and a few try to copy and flame out -- it just kinda proves my point? People naturally like jumping on a bandwagon. And don't forget that much of what you, I, and others blog about is how to make decisions, not step-by-step guides. For somebody looking for a quick fix (which I posit to be most readers), it's not that rewarding. So for my purposes I'm specifically talking about low-input, high-output ideas. Things like knowing the personal phone numbers of a dozen tech journalists and successful ways to pitch them. That is something you're not going to see. Not a huge corpus of text covering every general type of startup there is and the concepts that make them work. We have a lot of that. Heck, we've got dozens of HNers that are making a business providing the same kind of thing you're talking about. Sort of self-cannibalization. If the generalization were true -- if there were no way you could get people to follow your startup advice no matter how much you shouted -- we wouldn't have people paying for exactly the same advice from others. Something does not match up here. Detailed business plans with lots of blogging about A/B testing and so forth only serve to dull the audience to sleep. After all, who wants to really work at something over a period of years? (I hope I have learned the importance of this, but I suspect many just give the idea lip service) Thanks for the comment. I'd love to be wrong as well. I got the whole thing about how you could paint your idea on a wall and nobody would care, but that's not what I'm trying to get at. I'm talking about all the thrashing around that goes on around high-level concepts. That's not all just insignificant, especially if you are looking to a peer group for feedback. I probably mucked up the point. Sorry about that. I find that I have to read the same concepts many many times to be able to apply them to a different business model. Most times it doesn't seem like there's anything I can do with it. Many times I'm reading it going "yeah, but why in the heck do I want to chase 3% increase when I'm only making ten bucks anyway"? It's not that folks aren't publishing all kinds of instructions and broad generalizations and such, it's the tension between having nothing in your hand and actually being ramen profitable. A lot of these articles are written by guys who already have momentum. For them, yes, some of this matters. They're already months in, seeing money, and ready to stay for the long haul. But I'd bet the large majority vacillate between playing around with startup ideas and sitting back and observing. This post was meant for those folks. ADD: Apologies to the folks who are pointing out the poor structure of the article. While I was writing it, it definitely had a feeling to it of my viciously thrashing around an idea without actually getting to it. Fortunately Patio has helped me clarify what the thesis should have been all along: because of both the mixed messages we send and the size of the HN audience, we've actually created something we didn't mean to: an environment where lots of copying goes on, but not many are really working in a way that generates good learning about startups. Instead it's much more of a copycat, cool-for-a-day, chase-the-herd atmosphere. Don't do that.
spacemanaki 15y ago
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 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.
squarecat 15y ago
This is far from a new phenomenon: look at the early days of the automobile up to today's KIRF iPhones.
eytanlevit 15y ago
Welcome to capitalism
coderdude 15y ago
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.
tucosan 15y ago
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?
drats 15y ago
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.
jfornear 15y ago
If short-term copycats are threats to your business, you're business must have no plan and a death wish.
- dmils4 15y ago
  well said.
  - dmils4 15y ago
    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.
jrockway 15y ago
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 15y ago
  > 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 15y ago
    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.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ianbishop 15y ago
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 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 15y ago
  > 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2011-kelly-what-tech-wants-ch7.pdf http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2011-kelly-what-tech-wants-c...
ericHosick 15y ago
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".
jcr 15y ago
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.
melvinmt 15y ago
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.
kstenerud 15y ago
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 15y ago
In my experience, I've noticed that successful competitive advantages don't come from features. That's because anyone can implement a feature.
tluyben2 15y ago
> 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 15y ago
  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.
AznHisoka 15y ago
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.
jacquesm 15y ago
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.
unreal37 15y ago
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.
alain94040 15y ago
I stand by "people copy success, not ideas." All ideas are stupid until proven successful. By then, copying is too late.
- joyceaskyadl 15y ago
  Its quite true .. for lots of time .. we are extracting ideas about the success not the full original idea!
eichin 15y ago
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_)
marshallp 15y ago
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.
gadders 15y ago
I remember reading an interesting article by Eric Sink once: http://www.ericsink.com/articles/Game_Afoot.html 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.

207 points by DanielBMarkham 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
- 16s 15y ago
  Isn't this sort of counter to open source and free software and the tools that many of us use daily? I mean half the tools we use are free and given away. Ruby, Linux, gcc, etc. What if the guys behind those projects never shared their ideas or gave things away for free? I mean it seems sort of hypocritical. I hope this doesn't come off as negative, but it just struck me that way.
  - o1iver 15y ago
    The difference is that those people never intended to make money of those projects. Or at least not directly (Red Hat).
- getsat 15y ago
  http://sivers.org/multiply http://sivers.org/multiply
formosa 15y ago
An interesting exercise would be to leak your idea just to see how everyone fails or succeeds while you build your own version. This would obviously only work if you had an inherent advantage in the market though haha.
- DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  That's the hell of the thing, as the article points out: you'll never know what you screwed up. Yes, it'd be great if you could have 100 people all starting from the same point and everybody learning the lessons of what worked and what didn't because of total openness, but that's just not happening. Instead you'll get 2 or 3 survivors writing blog articles about how awesome their startup is without actually reporting anything at the level of detail you'd need to actually improve.

formosa 15y ago

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.

jenius 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.
ed209 15y ago
I agree with the sentiment of your comment, but being better than everyone else is not enough [1]. I'm sure there a lots of better alternatives to things you use in your life, but you're not using them because you never heard of them (marketing) or it never got to market (bad financial management) or many other areas where that better product got beaten. [1] I'll take better than everyone in this case to mean better at painting and not better at everything.
temphn 15y ago
But what if you are better than everyone else at coming up with ideas, but slower at executing (say in the 90th rather than the 99th percentile)? Just as in mathematics, solving a problem vs. simply checking that the solution is right do not have the same degree of difficulty.

patio11 15y ago

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.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago
I don't know, Patrick. I've long been an "you can shout your idea from the rooftops and it won't matter" guy for a long time. All I'm trying to do here is point out that this isn't a blanket rule. Or at least I've stopped believing that it is. I think people see statements like yours and believe there is no tiny idea about execution that will generate immediate positive results if copied. But that's demonstrably not true. In fact, thousands of folks are chasing just such a thing. Folks know this instinctively. Perhaps nobody cares that much about the large concept of selling bingo cards or the broad hunk of small details it takes to make that happen? Perhaps if I describe in detail how to make 2K a month -- and it takes a huge amount of effort over a year and a few try to copy and flame out -- it just kinda proves my point? People naturally like jumping on a bandwagon. And don't forget that much of what you, I, and others blog about is how to make decisions, not step-by-step guides. For somebody looking for a quick fix (which I posit to be most readers), it's not that rewarding. So for my purposes I'm specifically talking about low-input, high-output ideas. Things like knowing the personal phone numbers of a dozen tech journalists and successful ways to pitch them. That is something you're not going to see. Not a huge corpus of text covering every general type of startup there is and the concepts that make them work. We have a lot of that. Heck, we've got dozens of HNers that are making a business providing the same kind of thing you're talking about. Sort of self-cannibalization. If the generalization were true -- if there were no way you could get people to follow your startup advice no matter how much you shouted -- we wouldn't have people paying for exactly the same advice from others. Something does not match up here. Detailed business plans with lots of blogging about A/B testing and so forth only serve to dull the audience to sleep. After all, who wants to really work at something over a period of years? (I hope I have learned the importance of this, but I suspect many just give the idea lip service) Thanks for the comment. I'd love to be wrong as well. I got the whole thing about how you could paint your idea on a wall and nobody would care, but that's not what I'm trying to get at. I'm talking about all the thrashing around that goes on around high-level concepts. That's not all just insignificant, especially if you are looking to a peer group for feedback. I probably mucked up the point. Sorry about that. I find that I have to read the same concepts many many times to be able to apply them to a different business model. Most times it doesn't seem like there's anything I can do with it. Many times I'm reading it going "yeah, but why in the heck do I want to chase 3% increase when I'm only making ten bucks anyway"? It's not that folks aren't publishing all kinds of instructions and broad generalizations and such, it's the tension between having nothing in your hand and actually being ramen profitable. A lot of these articles are written by guys who already have momentum. For them, yes, some of this matters. They're already months in, seeing money, and ready to stay for the long haul. But I'd bet the large majority vacillate between playing around with startup ideas and sitting back and observing. This post was meant for those folks. ADD: Apologies to the folks who are pointing out the poor structure of the article. While I was writing it, it definitely had a feeling to it of my viciously thrashing around an idea without actually getting to it. Fortunately Patio has helped me clarify what the thesis should have been all along: because of both the mixed messages we send and the size of the HN audience, we've actually created something we didn't mean to: an environment where lots of copying goes on, but not many are really working in a way that generates good learning about startups. Instead it's much more of a copycat, cool-for-a-day, chase-the-herd atmosphere. Don't do that.

spacemanaki 15y ago

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 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.

squarecat 15y ago

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

eytanlevit 15y ago

Welcome to capitalism

coderdude 15y ago

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.

tucosan 15y ago

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?

drats 15y ago

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.

jfornear 15y ago

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

dmils4 15y ago
well said.
- dmils4 15y ago
  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.

jrockway 15y ago

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 15y ago
> 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 15y ago
  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.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ianbishop 15y ago

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 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 15y ago
> 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2011-kelly-what-tech-wants-ch7.pdf http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2011-kelly-what-tech-wants-c...

ericHosick 15y ago

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".

jcr 15y ago

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.

melvinmt 15y ago

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.

kstenerud 15y ago

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 15y ago

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

tluyben2 15y ago

> 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 15y ago
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.

AznHisoka 15y ago

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.

jacquesm 15y ago

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.

unreal37 15y ago

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.

alain94040 15y ago

I stand by "people copy success, not ideas." All ideas are stupid until proven successful. By then, copying is too late.

joyceaskyadl 15y ago
Its quite true .. for lots of time .. we are extracting ideas about the success not the full original idea!

eichin 15y ago

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_)

marshallp 15y ago

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.

gadders 15y ago

I remember reading an interesting article by Eric Sink once: http://www.ericsink.com/articles/Game_Afoot.html 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.