EDIT: I wouldn't trust the opinions of the 'just execute better' posters here, considering your competitors' employees already infiltrated your slack channel.
You may have a board seat. And if you don't like what the company is doing your most powerful move is resign from the board. Another option is to force a shareholder vote, but if the founders still hold the majority (as they should, at this phase) that will be overruled.
I'm freshly amazed by the lack of basic corporate law knowledge in the context of HN, this is really something that should be known if you partake of conversations like these.
I agree they should respond appropriately, but depending on what happened that response may not satisfy you.
Being copied sucks, and I agree that it should be looked down upon culturally, but I think "just execute better" really is the right answer. It's better for consumers and ultimately better for entrepreneurs too.
I've also had a funded competitor copy our business model and attempt to compete.
I sued the first one, the other one we outcompeted in spite of a 30:1 funding discrepancy. Regardless, these things are distractions and some funded bunch of cowboys destroying the market for you when you've spent a long time to get established can be a real problem. Even if they go under they'll do a lot of damage, not just to you, but also to their customers and possibly the whole field as a consequence of their activities. For instance: to offer the product for free because they're burning investor cash.
If you're just saying that an API or a website is copyrighted and can't be ripped off verbatim, that sounds more reasonable to me. But still, it's trivial to copy but then make minor cosmetic changes (especially with AI). Then we're back to a very troublesome gray area.
The fact that they infiltrated the OPs comms channels certainly doesn't make them look good.
It was a public community slack channel. There may have been proprietary/protected information shared in there but in my naive opinion (NAL!) that wouldn't be protected by trade secrets if it was shared publicly. Some things could still be protected by copyright or trademark but it's pretty unlikely. It's possible copying the API could be infringing but Google v. Oracle[0] makes that a very uphill battle.
"Secret sauce" is highly valued by founders and product managers but IMHO it's generally overvalued and doesn't constitute a moat. For the most part, competitors are allowed to copy most things and leverage whatever other advantages they have over the original innovators.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....
Getting a professional opinion on the options is generally better than just making assumptions. Copycats and rip-offs are a fact of life, but that doesn't mean they should enjoy free reign. It's not that I think litigation is better than execution, but people exclusively advocating the latter are expressing an opinion about how they think things should work in a perfect world while not having any assets of their own on the line.
Document everything.
They item would be whether or not YC is aware of this and whether or not your application or parts thereof somehow made it to these people. If it did you have a much stronger case, if it did not then you need to document very carefully which bits you believe have been copied, timestamp the works and make sure your lawyer gives you a fair assessment of what to expect in terms of costs and what your claim will be.
I can't look into your walled but depending on how much backing you've got you may be able to hit the pretty hard or you may have to walk away from it, even if you have proof, hard to tell.
Legal fees will drain your funds faster than anything else and you will probably not see any benefits from it
In fact it might be what makes your company fail (taking away the focus from building your business)
And yes, it might make your company fail. But that goes for a well funded competitor outright copying your product as well.
For the looks of it, in this case they should either not do it at all or just wait until they have enough money to do it
Even large companies wait for the right timing to sue
I know a company that had copied some images from Instacart. Instacart knew about it, but they waited until Uber acquired the company, then they sued Uber
Legal action is incredibly expensive and time consuming, especially in the US
Depending on what they copied it can be anywhere from 'meh' to 'guilty'. What it looks like isn't relevant other than in the context of whether or not it is their original work or not.
Last time I looked, YC doesn't invest much in the companies it accepts.
But I want to focus on the overall tone that you've taken in this discussion: You're playing the victim. It's hurting your credibility.
I assume that you applied to other incubators? That you've tried to pitch other venture capitalists and other sources of funding?
Why aren't you getting what you're looking for? Don't assume it's because everyone is sexist! Be honest with yourself!
The APIs look fairly different to me from a brief look through the docs. Apart from both using some resource names like 'Campaigns' and 'Customers' that you'd expect any platform in this space to use, most of the actual endpoints seem to be quite different.
Same with the overall set of features. There are some features in common, but also features on both sides that aren't shared. Website design and copy is totally different.
It seems like OP is unhappy that a competitor is funded by YC and did competitive research in their public community Slack channel. I get that, but I see no evidence that anything was directly copied. It doesn't seem fair to tarnish the reputation of Rehook's founders without evidence to back it up. It's not wrong or illegal to build a competitor to an existing product.
Yes, that's why I said:
Where it starts to get iffy is when you start talking about people literally copying your HTML/CSS or what-not. Is that the case here? If so, call a lawyer.
where "or what-not" is short-hand for the exhaustive list of "things that can be copied" that I had neither the time not the inclination to list out explicitly.
There are a lot of people in the tech world with the right connections, access to capital, and execution skill, but who either aren't creative enough to come up with an innovative product, or prefer to be the nth-mover in an already-validated market to the risk of trying to establish a new market. If they see that you have a good idea but aren't executing/growing/raising money at an A+ level, they will swoop in and copy your idea and then pretend that they were the first to come up with it.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with this apart from (imo) being kind of lame on a personal level. The consumer ultimately benefits from the competition, and you have only yourself to blame really for creating an opening by not executing quickly and effectively enough. It's capitalism. All the solutions to this 'problem' I've ever heard proposed--software patents and the like--create far worse problems for people who want to innovate.
If you're working on a new idea and are seeing real traction, you just need to expect this and factor it into your strategy. This is why so much emphasis is placed on having a 'moat' of some kind that is difficult to reproduce. If you're seeing success and it's easy to copy you, someone's probably already working on a clone.
Now is the time to do this. If they just pivoted, and are literally copying you, they can just pivot to something else. You could even get them to agree to transfer/refer their customers as a settlement.
All this assumes they did something illegal. Copyright is the best thing to check: have they literally copied anything (APIs may be legal to copy, see Oracle vs Google).
> When people copy you, the best strategy is usually to ignore them. People who copy you are (a) unoriginal and (b) opportunists, and those are both strong predictors of failure. If you wait them out, they'll eventually drop away.
/s?
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1697761812698034630?s=46
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1500779743804903427?s=46
Of course he’s completely wrong, but YC won’t really do anything about it (except maybe reap the benefits)
For what it’s worth, I’m sorry this happened to you, it sucks
At the same time, seems like you might be onto something and should just keep going strong
Also, maybe you could apply to YC, they usually don’t care about funding competing companies
> As a female founder, having my app rejected by YC with this product, it just makes me angry.
You can still apply multiple times after getting rejected. There’s plenty of stories of companies/founders that only got into YC after several rejections
To be honest, if I were in their situation I wouldn’t apply again, but it could be a good move regardless
Sometimes this happens without them even knowing, because they put money into a company very early on, then the company pivots and starts competing with another YC company
Focus on your differentiator/USP and providing the best service to your customers. Any decent and obvious market has copycats and competitors.
If you really believe in yourself and your team, work hard to outcompete them. Like many others have said, unless there is something illegal about this, it is fair game.
Also sorry I am not good reading the signals - why would being a female founder make you angrier than a non female founder? Id be angry as F too if a clone of my hard work appeared out of no where!
Any code that's written from scratch is automatically assigned copyright to the creator or their employer at the time of creation. API's are probably considered copyrighted by the courts but getting any kind of remedy for that will be exceedingly difficult after Google vs. Oracle.
> Id be angry as F too if a clone of my hard work appeared out of no where!
This happens literally all the time. I wouldn't recommend someone be a founder if this upsets them. No half-decent innovation isn't instantly cloned by 10 fly-by-night copycats and multiple large incumbents.
> This happens literally all the time. I wouldn't recommend someone be a founder if this upsets them. No half-decent innovation isn't instantly cloned by 10 fly-by-night copycats and multiple large incumbents.
+10 - My only point here I wasnt sure why being a female founder mattered whether you could/should get angry. Getting angry is reasonable - just that what you do next and how you pick yourslef matters.
https://www.bhfs.com/insights/alerts-articles/2021/supreme-c...
Is your business defensible?
(Remember, APIs generally aren't protected by intellectual property. It's the implementation or patents that protect your product. For example, if copying your API violates your patent, then you have a case.)
It should go without saying that these shouldn't be new concepts to anyone running a startup.
But: since the OP doesn't supply any information at all all you can do is speculate about whether or not that is what happened.
Ironically the founder worked at Rocket-internet which was notorious for copying successful startups
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/wimdu-rocket-internets-air...
Does that change what you consider “telling” or not?
Edit: I should also note it is not on the front page any more