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Ask HN: Someone in Iran copied my website. How would you go about this?

2 points by founderling ↗ HN
I started my one-man startup about a year ago. It is based on a new kind of web interface catering to a huge market. It's all happening in the browser. HTML+CSS+Javascript.

All the time I developed it in the open. Meanwhile I have about 200,000 monthly visitors using my site.

Friends always asked me "Well, it is all based on this innovative interface idea. How will you avoid being copied?". And my answer was "I don't know. But I don't think companies die by being copied.".

Now somebody in Iran has simply copied the whole thing over to his server. He translated it to Iranian language and made a couple of changes adapting it to the Iranian market. Not sure how good of a coder he is. If it is a company or an individual. He changed a lot, but most of the code is still mine. Including my Analytics code. So all day I can see him in my analytics reports.

I check the site once a day and see he keeps building on it. It is also indexed by Google already, although it seems he is only getting a handful of visitors at the moment. It looks like he did not intend to be life yet because lots of the functionality in his version is still broken. But I see him fix stuff every day.

How would you go about this?

3 comments

[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 17.6 ms ] thread
someone_new
Well you build your site, don't you have backdoor ?
saluki
I wouldn't worry too much about this. People are going to copy success.

Unless the Iranian market is critical to your success/rollout I would just write them off as a clone.

Take it as validation of your idea.

Maybe start looking at ways you can move more of your app in to a backend that they won't be able to copy/paste as easily. But I would take it as a compliment.

Carry on, keep making progress on the english version.

Maybe have some fun with some javascript or images if he's hot linking.

Throwaway90283
I've seen my site copied countless times. There are at least 5 or 6 clones that are blatant knockoffs. There are people that bought the non .com domains of my site, and copied the images I designed, and sections of my html code. There are well known companies that have literally copied some of my content word for word and passed it off as their own. One of the clones is similar to your situation, they created their clone for a different country and language, and have a few hundred thousand users.

I stopped caring. I'm by far the leader in the space, and I spend my time ensuring I provide a superior service to the clones. It's actually turned out in the benefit of everyone. It provided motivation, and I worked twice as hard to stay ahead of the pack, so now my site is extremely polished. My users are happy, because they've seen the service continue to improve.

So, my advice is not to worry about it, and to focus on providing the best experience for users, so your competitors have no room. However, keep an eye on the competition, and make sure they're not beating you in any area, that might persuade users to switch services.