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YC startup accused of stealing design from CBInsights
- asanwal 12y agoI know imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but Techlist's analytics capabilities have an uncanny resemblance to CB Insights. In addition, 12 folks from their team have signed up for our free trial since September including the CEO, head of product, designer, product manager and a senior ruby developer. Take a look at their heatmap. The color scheme to even the text underneath is exactly the same. Here is our heatmap which we launched 2 years ago: http://cbi.vc/1AsvNy3 http://cbi.vc/1AsvNy3 Their industry graphs are also the same. Here is ours: http://cbi.vc/1Asw0kR http://cbi.vc/1Asw0kR On the bright side, this is a bit of an ego boost, and we're flattered that these guys liked CB Insights so much that they wanted one just like it for themselves. Note: I'm the CEO of CB Insights.
- jusben1369 12y agoDo you think they just copied you to launch rapidly/MVP and if successful/raise then they would have resources to go in their own design direction?
- ConfuciusSay 12y agoAre you suggesting that excuses the copying?
- jusben1369 12y agoNot at all! Just trying to grapple with how they think they could get away with it over time. Perhaps they didn't plan to.
- asanwal 12y agoTo be honest, I don't care :) And copying our work was good enough to get them into YC so guess mission accomplished. Hopefully YC doesn't condone this type of behavior. When the CEO and 11 other employees sign up for someone else's service to copy it, it seems originality might be in short supply.
- hamburglar 12y agoIt seems like people think you're commenting about this because you want them stopped, which doesn't seem to be the case to me. You just want it acknowledged that they did this shitty thing. I agree that it's shitty and I assume it's not actionable and think you're right to just be right out in the open saying "well, they stole our design and got away with it... more power to them." I do wonder if HN leadership has any comments on this type of behavior, because it really does look shitty coming from one of their teams.
- asanwal 12y agoI didn't post the original link. Honestly, I'd love for them to be stopped but this is the internet after all :) I, like you, am curious if YC condones this type of copying esp since the CEO admitted it on Twitter. But it's shitty and our team does a lot of hard work so I do hate to see it copied. That said, we've seen plenty of unoriginal folks do similar stuff in the past, and they've all failed as they focus on us while we focus on customers.
- williswee 12y agoHi Anand you're right that 2 of our analytics layouts share a very similar aesthetic to those on CBI. On behalf of myself personally and on behalf of Tech in Asia and the Techlist team, I apologize. We're doing a lot of work to make sure Techlist is unique behind the scenes, and of course the data we're pulling into our site is unique and Asia-focused, but we definitely made a mistake in taking too much from CBI's visual design. It was a shortcut, and one that we shouldn't have taken, as it does a disservice to you, to Tech in Asia, and to our customers. There's really no excuse; we should have put more time into coming up with our own visuals. In the immediate future we will be working on finding a more unique aesthetic framework within which to present our data. Note: I'm the CEO of Tech in Asia that runs Techlist.
- williswee 12y agoUpdate: we changed our location and vertical analytics graph layouts overnight. http://i.imgur.com/vJLd9Ls.jpg http://i.imgur.com/vJLd9Ls.jpg http://i.imgur.com/2KYx7zK.jpg http://i.imgur.com/2KYx7zK.jpg
- Plough_Jogger 12y agoI can't imagine YC having a problem with team members testing a competitors' product, that's a pretty fundamental aspect of market research. Yes, they admitted to being influenced by yor charts, but you can't really claim IP on a line graph. The best product will win, and your public cries of unfairness/ foul play is not a positive business signal. It looks like CB Insights just dropped off of my investor-data-startups heat-map, which my team is working furiously to re-style, we had copied Techlist.
- teddyuk 12y agoI honestly don't know why someone would go to the effort of starting a company, obviously get some funding and entry to yc and not want the app to be unique and well thought out (not saying yours isn't) - I would want to put my mark all over it and the ui is critical to what customers see. It is just stupid and shows bad judgment, not a company I would use.
- tablet 12y agoSo someone stole your design and you cry out? WTF? Is it a kind of PR campaign? Get back to work and do something fucking unique that other can't easily steal. Invent. Cool inventions even in UI are hard to steal. You have NOTHING FUCKING SPECIAL in this design to cry about it.
- brodd 12y agoThey both look like Bootstrap sites to me.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- godzillabrennus 12y agoSounds like you might be their Xerox.
- postit 12y agoshame
- pg_is_a_butt 12y agoPG IS A BUTT. lying cheats all of them.
- jbob2000 12y agoYou didn't come up with the idea of a heatmap. Their designs are different enough that I wouldn't consider it stealing. You're in the same space it looks like, of course there is going to be crossover.
- th0br0 12y agoHave a look at the non-heatmap pages. They seem to be a copy of each other down to the order of the various parameters; even the labels tend to be identical or slightly rephrased...
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoWhat's actionable about this issue? The original design was good; they riffed on that. Like everybody else.
- jbob2000 12y agoIt's still different. This is a common layout for charted data. Likewise, Ford can't sue Mercedes for coming out with a 4 wheeled car; that's what makes the most sense. There's different fonts, different colors, different spacing, some less important elements are in different places. Forget it, this is just a tweet to stir up discussion and generate some page hits.
- asanwal 12y agoThe CEO of this company admits they used our design as "reference" to get something out the door quickly. Here's his tweets that admit this: http://cbi.vc/1u9KQu9 http://cbi.vc/1u9KQu9
- jbob2000 12y agoAnd you just pulled your design out of thin air? You woke up one day magically having this design idea without any prior influence? Please, you had your own references as well. At my company, we routinely look at what our competitors are doing and we routinely look at ways of integrating their ideas into our product. It's not stealing, it's just business.
- DanBC 12y agoNormally when you accuse people of plagiarism you present side by side screenshots. That allows rapid comparison. Linking to a twitter stream is suboptimal. (That's true for any reason except directly linking to a specific comment that some person has made, but especially true here.)
- hubridnoxx 12y agoRead the blog post again- there are side-by-side screenshots
- mlevkovsky 12y agoI would have reached out personally to the CEO, instead of publicly shaming.
- akassover 12y agoWhy is that better? (Not trying to pick a fight, just curious how this would lead to a better outcome.)
- calinet6 12y agoWell, look what happened. In public. Really doesn't make anyone look good.
- mikecarroll 12y agoMakes CBInsights look pretty good, actually.
- speby 12y agoI'll second that. It makes CB Insights look good because it now is well-known that a slightly more unscrupulous competitor stole the otherwise brilliant design of CB Insights because they were unable to come up with something they could call their own (or do better than CB Insights). It's the lazy way. The beautiful thing about it? Those who copy (blatantly) are doomed to fail. In most cases, they will lack the understanding and foundation of how you arrived at the designs in the first place which certainly consisted of iteration and changes based on interactions with & feedback from customers.
- hautit 12y agoGet over it, CBInsights, your UX sucks.
- Gurkenmaster 12y agoIt sucks so much that someone else copied it?
- theUXclub 12y agoCB Insights, cheap and creepy as always. A 'low-drama' group of people that decided to tweet and share the story all over the place claiming something like 'Look! They copied us!'- Your UX is bad as hell, I wouldn't be very proud. Plus, your site is Bootstrap (a framework created for people who have no skills or time to invest on CSS or design), did you also invent it and they copied you as well?
- level09 12y ago"a framework created for people who have no skills or time to invest on CSS or design" This is hilarious, I kinda agree with it though
- frumpywooly 12y ago"...12 folks from their team have signed up for our free trial since September including the CEO, head of product, designer, product manager and a senior ruby developer." CBInsights, creepiest company in America
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mpeg 12y agoHonestly, their site looks a lot better. Taking inspiration from your KPI charts and flow is completely normal, everyone looks at their established competition for inspiration.
- four 12y agoTuesday, Feb. 11, 2015, 10:24 a.m. My view of the point of this story: Copying a design is efficient business. Implementing someone else's idea instead of creating your own is lazy and lacks integrity. Profiting from someone else's work, without attribution or mutual agreement is stealing, is unethical and lacks integrity. Apologizing for acting wrongly is an act of integrity. So is ceasing one's unethical behavior. The rules are: Take responsibility for your potential and for your actions. Don't be lazy. Don't steal. When you act wrongly, acknowledge it, stop it, fix it.
- axg 12y agoA good design team would look at a competitor's site and say, "we can do better". A poor design team would look at a competitor's site and say, "we can copy that".