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4 Comments

Is it illegal / unethical to create an info product explaining how to re-create a third party's onboarding flow

Asking because it feels like the smaller the third party the more unethical it becomes, e.g

is it unethical to create an info product about Amazon's onboarding flow?
how about Shopify's? How about Memberstack's? How about that mum and pop online business' flow ? How about Joana's personal business' onboarding flow?

The third party's onboarding flow I'd like to create this info product for is the site for @brettwill1025's one person business, DesignJoy.

Also asking because DesignJoy has this in one of their contract clauses:

"Further, Client agrees to refrain from the following:
...
Decipher, decompile, disassemble, or reverse engineer any of the software comprising or in any way making up a part of the Website
"

Given I'm not a client, not sure this applies, but that's a grey area.

Re: the info product, here's a free access link of work in progress, and I think it only mentions DesignJoy, if at all, when telling readers what to expect from the product: https://www.figma.com/file/5ppHDvZw4Yu4huY6HWtHB7/Untitled?node-id=0%3A1

So unethical, illegal, do I need explicit consent?

....

A huge part of me feels given I felt the need to ask this I probably do.

on April 21, 2022
  1. 2

    I feel like this is ok. I don't see how this would hurt his business.

    A few questions you should ask yourself before doing this are:

    • Will this hurt the business (cost money, clients or credibility)?
    • Do you infringe on copyrights (You obviously shouldn't copy/paste their texts)?
    • Is this something you could have discovered yourself or built on your own?

    With the variety of nocode tools that exist, building something similar to what he did shouldn't be an issue.

    You aren't a customer so you probably don't have all the inside-out of his process. How does he manage customer requests internally? What's his process to hand out the designs to clients?

    So you have a part of the puzzle. Not the rest.

    1. 2

      Thanks so much for your response 🙌 !

  2. 2

    Hey 👋

    IMO it’s fine. (Not a lawyer) But ask the owner, if you feel you need to. 🙂

    Some thoughts perhaps worth consideration, if you haven’t already:

    • does it hurt the owner’s business to do this?
    • could you help the owner’s business by doing this?
    • are you sure it’s all the original work of the owner and not completely or partially copied from elsewhere?
    • what would you do if the owner said “no way!” and how would you feel? Would you do it anyway?
    • are you copying/explaining the process or the content? What’s the difference?
    • does this help others? How?
    • is it really such a big deal? Why?
    • what’s the worst that could happen?
    • what’s the best that could happen?
      Etc.

    Imagine you’re doing this to write a blog post about the importance of a good onboarding workflow. You break down this WF and maybe another couple to help people to really understand what great actually looks like.
    You explain in detail all the nuance and salient aspects so it’s crystal clear why this is exceptionally good relative to most.
    The article you’ve written is so good it ranks number one on Google for years. Luckily, being a good person, you’d added a link to the design joy home page.

    Over time the article is read by millions of people starting new businesses; they’re
    just in the stage of building-out their site and need a good designer for logo, branding and colour choices. Your page ends up driving the majority of the converting customers for years to come and helps grow design joy into a 20M ARR business. 🤷‍♂️

    HTH
    🍻

    1. 1

      Love the insight from this ❤️ 🙌 . Thanks @Shaunau