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28 Comments

Someone wants to replicate my product on UpWork (a milestone?)

So, I saw this today on UpWork. I'm not sure how to respond to this. What are your thoughts?

  1. 5

    Sell them a subscription to your api,
    but their hire rate looks a bit sketchy

    1. 3

      agree!
      I sent them an offer.

    2. 1

      No kidding. This is a great idea.

  2. 3

    I've had this happen to me in the past. It's frustrating and flattering at the same time.

    In the end, don't waste your time worrying about competitors. Especially ones that are going to get a contractor to create a clone of your product on the cheap. These folks are not good operators and their cloned product will never take off.

    Instead, focus on improving your product, listening to customers, and increasing marketing reach. If you do that, you'll win.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the comment.
      I'm focused on my customers and don't really concern about the cloning. As you mentioned, it is a mixed feeling between frustrating and flattering.

      I wrote him and offered collabration.

  3. 3

    I wonder how serious the buyer is, estimating this at 5k, I have a feeling the lowest he'd get would be 40-50k, he only ever paid 5k total and hired for just 30% of his posts .
    I wonder if the mean offer of companies actually able to implememt would be more in the 150k-200k
    Like there is such a wide skillset required in his request and it sounds like he wants shown prof that the implementation is better than others .. just the sampeling, testing, training and running on samples, front end, WordPress, 20 API endpoints?, Multilingual including harder charsets, many partially specified items that represent risks for the offer.

    1. 1

      As you said, it does include 4 major tasks and requires a different skillset. He did include an academic research paper (just general on spam filtering) which additional skill to read and able to implement.

      A few days, a student contacted me through live chat on the website regarding the spam-filtering project. We talked and I helped him with some ideas. I wonder if he was not a student after all 😄

  4. 2

    Welcome to the race my friend! This is were it gets fun!

    1. 1

      Thanks! I love racing 💪🏼😄

  5. 1

    This is how success looks like

  6. 1

    I agree, definitely chalk it up to a milestone. Once people start copying you, there is a good chance you have product market fit.

    1. 1

      This is great! Makes me more motivated to keep working on it.

  7. 1

    I suppose congrats, you've made it!

    I would be very tempted to submit a proposal and pitch them your product.

    1. 2

      Good idea - also in case, they want to build their own you could make an on‐premises offer using replicated.com to put the server cost on their side.

      But I agree that 5k is very low for this!

      1. 2

        That's a good idea, do an old school licensing agreement. You can run it on your side for X a year.

    2. 2

      Thanks! Honestly, I have a mixed feeling about this :)

      I did send them an offer. Hopefully, they will respond.

      1. 2

        That's brilliant, love to see how they respond. It's always a weird feeling though.

        1. 2

          They responded.

          They couldn't find what they are looking for my product. So I offered them custom service. Let's see how it'll turn out.

          1. 1

            That's good can't hurt, might be some good feature ideas for you.

  8. 1

    You might also be getting some free SEO boost ;)

  9. 1

    Good artists copy, great artists steal.

    You can offer them a resell/white label/API services? That way they are sort of a marketing partner/another type of customer...

    Think of the use you can get out of it..

    1. 1

      Thanks for the input.
      I'm not concern about stealing/copy part, to be honest.

      As you mentioned, I'm thinking how to best utilize the situation.

      1. 2

        Try to communicate with the requestor, you can be honest and say your the owner of that other product which sounds similar and wonder if he would like to have a talk about some co-op ideas

        If your both not too emotional/competitive, that might start a thing for both of you.

        1. 1

          He offers a lot of money for the project. I don't even make that much from the project (YET :) ). Hopefully, he will respond. I'm open to collabrate.

          1. 1

            5k?

            Exit opportunity?

            😅

            1. 1

              Well, I guess it is not that much 😁
              It's growing slow and steady.

      2. 2

        Just sent them collaboration offer.

        1. 1

          Just as I was writing you should try to contact him :)

          GMTA

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