YC company copied our product, what can we do?

Stop talking about it and call a law firm. Your local Bar Association will be able to give you a list of firms/attorneys that practice in this area, or your existing lawyer may have a recommendation. Many law firms will give you a short consultation for free. Bring a succinct written summary of the facts with you that briefly describes the product, how you discovered the issue, and what you found when you investigated, with dates. Include a list of evidence items you have already collected. Litigation is difficult and expensive, but if you have a strong case (and it sounds like you do) then the law firm may take it on contingency in return for a larger portion of the settlement/judgment.

EDIT: I wouldn't trust the opinions of the 'just execute better' posters here, considering your competitors' employees already infiltrated your slack channel.

Looks like the company in question is Rehook.ai https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/rehook-ai

Unless they literally stole your code, or had access to privileged information from your YC application or something, I doubt there is much you can do. It's not illegal to enter the same business as an existing company, or even to make an app that does the exact same thing. 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. If not, ignore them and just execute better.

Don’t worry, listen to pg https://x.com/paulg/status/1697761812698034630?s=46

> 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?

It sucks, but the only thing to do is kick ass in the field. The more successful you are, the more companies will copy you. We had companies with 30 or even 100 people hard pivot into an exact clone of our company when it was clear we had traction. We just have to keep out executing

YC companies also copy other YC companies. It happens all the time. Personally I would prefer that the world didn't work this way, but it's just how the game is played.

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.

Paul Graham says you shouldn’t care and they will probably fail:

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

Call your lawyer. This is not the venue for such a complaint, but the courts may very well be.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. This is just another proof point, you may even be able to use it to raise more capital.

Focus on your differentiator/USP and providing the best service to your customers. Any decent and obvious market has copycats and competitors.

Very sorry to hear this. Did you have any copyright to the apis or the code? Or even a ToS on your slack channel? IANAL so wouldn't hurt to speak to a lawyer.

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!

Copying product and/or API calls is not illegal. Otherwise Amazon would sue Backblaze for B2 (for example).

Talk to a lawyer. Copying your API is possibly a copyright violation. But take the lawyer's advice with the following grain of salt. It is in a lawyer's interest for you to go to court. But the best outcome FOR YOU is almost certainly a negotiated settlement. However your legal threat is the best way to get them to settle.

https://www.bhfs.com/insights/alerts-articles/2021/supreme-c...

I sympathize with your plight, and will second the comment about stopping talking to us and start talking to a lawyer.

This was uncalled for though:

>As a female founder...

Don't play that victim card. It's not respectable, and the only cohorts receptive to that card are not respectable cohorts, and not ones anyone wants to conduct business with.

Presumably they raised money, and will need to raise money again. That means that they have money (it's worthwhile to sue, assuming you can get damages). It also means it's a huge lever: they'll never be able to raise under active litigation, they'll have to tell their board, etc.

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).

Unless they stole something proprietary, you don't really have many options beyond doing your product better than them.

What does you being female have to do with the issue at hand?

Sorry OP but right now you need to turn the tables and copy the company that copied you. Their site looks and reads much better than yours.

I don't know, but the possible drama from this might be good for both companies. Start talking about it on twitter and see if you can get some reposts. Hopefully you can use it to your advantage, regardless of the legal outcome.

Just keep building. Ideas are cheap. Focus on execution.

I guess this is why VCs don't sign NDAs.

Throw a rock through their window.

Ask HN:

The real answer is to out execute them. Taking time to do legal action will only waste valuable resources.

Ironically the founder worked at Rocket-internet which was notorious for copying successful startups

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/wimdu-rocket-internets-air...

There's four kinds of intellectual property: Copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret. Which of those did they violate?

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.