This reads like personal drama in the form of a blog post. I didn't learn anything from it about how I should comport my company on HN, but the title pretty much demanded I click through. Irritating.
Next time keep names out of it, Jacques. I still wouldn't have liked the post much (I usually like your posts!), but I wouldn't have felt burned for following the link.
Point taken. Thanks! I got a little ticked off at this and I guess it shows, I was debating releasing the pdf of the analysis that 'phpnode' did for my site earlier today and this made me reconsider.
The insight to me is that if you post your turnover figures there will be people right here that will not even blink at cloning your pages to copy your concept.
That's news to me. If you think that's 'inane' that's fine with me but I think the insight is a valid one.
To me that says that there are lurkers on HN that are here with no other purpose than to look for stuff they can rip off.
I don't understand why discourage people to write. Not everything written by an author needs to be a great piece every single time. http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=195. If OP didn't post this, how could he find out what works or does not work in his writing?
It was a good post with interesting story. It's voted up to the front page so there're sufficient interest. Not everything posted needs to read like a press release or dissertation paper. It certainly reminds me there are potential competitors lurking here and be careful of what to divulge.
Clones are great, since you look at what they copied and then know what your competitive advantage wasn't. Ever heard of my clones? There are about half a dozen by now. Life is still going great for me.
I think the good news here is that they're all unable to hit that fine line that Zachary knew how to strike and for him it might not matter much, but start-ups can be vulnerable and being 'open' may not be the right approach.
Especially if it looks like you are sitting on a real moneymaker. Zachary is going for subscribers and at the rate it's growing the turnover of awesomenessreminders might well be in the hundreds of thousands before long. That sort of success is bound to bring the vultures in larger numbers than what bingo-card-creator would experience, with the combined pressure of so many jackals it might become a real problem.
After all, if you're the #1 in the field and you're making as much as you do it can't be too lucrative for your competition to be fighting over the remainder of the market, but how do you think it would develop if you made a million or more per year? I'm fairly sure the competition would heat up quite a bit.
By the way, I think you have a great thing going with opening up your figures like that, for the last week or so I've been see-sawing back and forth about doing the same thing, I'm not yet 100% convinced it's the way forward (but I'm a lot less vulnerable than Zachary at this point in time).
I was really in two minds about opening up the details about my startup although I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. In the end I decided to go for it and the decision was down in no small part to seeing the impact of your openness over the years.
There is never just one of a thing on the Internet. There are twelve.
Clones are par for the course. Once in a while the clones win, but not very often. They definitely keep you on your toes. Plus you can steal ideas back from them as well. They are kind of like your personal farm league.
If someone creates a site that makes money and can be cloned in a few hours of work, of course people are going to copy it.
Isn't that why investors want to know what the competitive advantage is with any company they're going to invest in? To prevent this sort of copy-catting?
A good point, but I think it's a simple distillation from two more important points: 1) Your business can be cloned; if it's any good, it will be - count on it. 2) Always always always be careful about what you put on the internet. If someone complains about their business idea being stolen after posting it online, they sound like the high school girl who can't fathom why her ex-boyfriend would put the naked pictures she sent him on the internet. Those were supposed to be private.
PS: Here's a fun thought. If you have recently had or are soon going to have a daughter, you are going to have to, at some point, teach her about not distributing naked pictures of herself. I doubt it's as bad an epidemic as TV makes it out to be, but you can bet the bank her health teacher isn't gonna touch that with a 10ft pole.
I think these clones are taking the concept way too far...having a total stranger call you every day saying "I miss you and I love you" is creepy and deranged.
EDIT: It gets worse. Who would want to receive a random phone call of "I want to nibble on your nuts"?
Personally I don't even understand why people want a useless phonecall every day. It might be funny the first few times, but would that wear off rather rapidly for me.
However, if there's really a market for a "nut nibble" call-service, I don't see anything creepy or deranged in providing it. There's surely much creepier and more deranged things out there...
I'm not sure what the "openness" is that is being referred to here. It just seems that various people took a quite simple idea, and copied it. Short of not telling people about your business, how are you going to stop this?
I think the big draw here is the money involved, not the concept per se.
When Zachary launched this was the general sentiment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616154 but then it took off and people started literally copying his website to clone it.
The clones are basically letting Zachary do the market research and the initial minimum viable product development to validate a concept before jumping in. Since Zachary releases a lot more market data, he just saves the clones whole bunch money.
I thought he got press coverage (Time) prior to his posting the numbers.
I believe that, other than telling others that it is a 'valid business', announcing those numbers did not achieve anything useful for him.
it was on the homepage from day 1. i recently removed it. i thought that it would be a good social proof counter and all my friend enjoyed keeping track of how it was growing. the site started out as a fun thing that happened to be profitable. i had no idea that it would grow like it did.
i want to continue sharing information among the community, but it's pretty weird that those guys straight up jacked my style without even emailing me. i honestly don't know how i'm going to proceed.
This is the paradox of capitalism. As things become cheaper, they become more like a commodity.
These clones of ideas are simply turning that idea into a commodity and aside from some minor surface changes, they're really the same. The competition created is fairly artificial.
Instead of thinking of it as a rip off, think of it as a way to improve your own commodity offering.
you should think of it as validation, if someone is willing to use their time to clone the product. Its mainly about execution, getting users, and building something people want, just building a product now and days can be done fast, cheap, and easy.
