9 days ago, the Cognition team—a group of objectively well-credited and very talented individuals—announced their new AI software engineer named Devin. This announcement caused quite a stir, generating tons of posts on social media and various memes commenting on its usefulness. It wouldn't be an understatement to say their announcement was widely noticed, including here on Hacker News.
this has resulted in a ton of unforeseen work for our small, two-person startup, Devin.fm. All the interested persons Google searches for the keyword 'Devin' has lead to a massive uptick in traffic to our site, since we are in the top of the search results.
For over three years, we've been building devin.fm, a DevOps tool for a niche programming language called Claris FileMaker. Before Cognition's announcement, we had around 20-30 website visits a day; now, it's up to several tens of thousands. These are obviously mistaken visitors looking for Devin, the AI software engineer.
Even after landing on our webpage, these new visitors still somehow believe that devin.fm is the new AI software engineer. They're downloading our app, attempting to install our software, spamming our public roadmap with random comments??? , and most recently (and the reason for writing this post) signing up for thousands of dollars worth of trial periods with what Stripe describes as 'highly likely fraudulent credit cards'.
This situation is consuming hours of our time as we sift through mistaken requests to find any actual potential customers. We receive so many support requests where we must discern whether the individual is a legitimate FileMaker developer or someone seeking an AI SWE. It's quite tiring and detracts from our main goal: to build our product.
We've attempted to reach out to the Cognition team via Twitter, LinkedIn, and email, but have not been able to get in contact with them, they obviously must have a lot to see to. We're not certain what we try to achieve by reaching out. It's highly unlikely they'll change their name, but perhaps there's a way for both of us to benefit from this situation. Cognition must be interested in directing these 150,000-some visitors to their site, or are we just being naive?
So does any of you have any tips on handling this situation? We're considering changing our name, but we've been building our brand for years and would ideally like to avoid it, but its just not productive work being done right now.
If you’re a startup that’s been around for a few years but whose website is only getting 30 daily hits, I think you’ve got an uphill battle to claim ownership of a word that’s also a common name.