Hacker News Reader

I absolutely agree. I have fallen into that trap a number of times. The latest was indeed with Fork the Cookbook. Some bloggers filed a DMCA request (fun fact, recipes cannot be copyrighted, so they essentially were perjuring themselves). It sapped so much energy from our marketing and coding efforts, that 3-4 weeks later we're still recovering - took ages to convince ourselves that it was still worth doing.

There's always a first time I guess

View on HN

Of course recipes can't be copyrighted, but you running into this issue proves just how much you screwed up at trying to understand your audience. Don't blame them for filling DMCA requests, blame yourself for not building something that they'll want to use and contribute to. Think about it for a minute. Does Github grab your source code without asking you and then offers people the option to fork it? No! Devs upload their source code to Github because they get a value out of it. The same goes for food blogs or anything else. If your target audience can't get any value out of your product, then you're dead before launching. As devs, we need to keep this in mind: people won't care if they can't get value. Just because it took you days/weeks/months/years/decades to build does not mean it will produce value for anyone. Only studying your target customers and building on top of this knowledge will.

For what it's worth, I just discovered your site and i find the overall design and experience awesome. It's light, clean, pro, has some fun elements and a bit of a nicely integrated branding which is cool (the forking idea). Well done!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com