HACKER Q&A
📣 cod3boy

Is it ethically right to build product that might end up as a rip off


Two weeks ago we launched a product on Product hunt that went on to #1. There were a lot of new users coming in and asking for new features/feedback, we were trying hard to keep up with the requests (used Notion for a while to track). Then I found Canny (one amazing tool) and a few others. But all of them were a little expensive for us and decided to make one for ourselves to track and manage feature requests from customers. http://featurequests.com/ is the landing page.

Is it ethically right to build a product that I know might end up as a rip-off, especially because these products already influence my design and thinking?

  👤 gus_massa Accepted Answer ✓
You can reimplement the features of other business/webpage if it's clear that it is a different page. (Just don't sneak in the server room at night to steal the source code. :) )

It's like Coca Cola and Pepsi. Just keep the look and feel / label different to avoid confusions. If you want an example in software, think about MS Office vs Open/Libre Office.

👤 oliv__
Is it ethically right for there to be competition in any given industry?
👤 bbody
A lot of large companies have ripped off or been accused of ripping off other companies and made millions if not billions e.g. Xero and Apple UI, Microsoft & Apple UI, Facebook & MySpace, MySpace & Friendster, etc. It is common but this doesn't exactly speak to the ethics, which is what you are asking.

I am a similar situation as you also working on a similar product. Here is what I would ask myself:

- Are you intending to copy them?

- Is their product particularly novel?

- What are you doing differently? Price, UX, features I require, integrating into different API's, etc.

I would highly focus in on differentiation, what makes you different from them? Are they too expensive, so you are disrupting their market with a comparable lower cost option. This is how a free market is supposed to work in a capitalist society.

Edit: Formatting