Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product • Hacker News Board

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#111

Post by wjnc » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #21

This may be a silver lining - a competitor has shown that the work you have done, exactly the work you have done is worth 55 million in VC funding. There are enough people on here who can point you in the right direction, or arrange introductions. Spend at least one of those millions on PR and lawyers to ensure it's clear who has the moral high ground, and who should be hired if a company has to choose between you -…

I would agree on this with one caveat - you should be able to run this battle on a back burner or don't go there. If it would consume you ... Don't. Your time and positive energy are too important. But if you can (it's what's in the CEO learning curve imho) spent a small faction of your time dealing with competitors. If this one is a proper competitor and you have leverage (public goodwill, cash to burn for litigation and communication) - go there. Your investors are probably with you if the threat is both to you and their investment. The outrage factor will probably play into your hands as well. A bankrolled litigation fund (smallish) is doable.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#112

Post by cypherpunks01 » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

prototyperaptor wrote: post #10

Could there possibly be reasonable explanation for this? With big name investors involved it's likely that respectable and legitimate reporters wouldn't be interested in digging up the truth.

You think they accidentally the whole docs?

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#113

Post by nickspacek » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

dawnerd wrote: post #94

tijs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The documentation only has a screenshot of the brands supported. Would be nice to just be able to lookup my car brand and make support in the docs instead of having to make an Auth flow first...

Yeah... I went to their homepage and still had no idea what cars they supported, what features the car needed, etc. From my understanding though they're just a wrapper API around the car manufactures existing apis?

Found this eventually: https://support.smartcar.com/faqs/which-car-brands-does-smar...

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#114

Post by keithwhor » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

Smartcar has raised $12M in financing from A16Z and NEA. The difference between $12M and $55M is a single financing stage.

What likely happened here is a remote team was paid to generate docs with a directive like, “Smartcar has a good API,” and stole them directly. Then the management team didn’t bother checking.

This is great PR for Smartcar all things considered, and I actually think has a fantastic silver lining:

The value of a good API isn’t the API itself. It’s the expertise of designing them. APIs are difficult, the majority of the industry sucks at designing and delivering them. Otonomo can always copy you, but if you have the actual expertise to continually deliver a fantastic API experience you will win in the long-term. Stripe and Twilio are your proof points. Go get ‘em, team.

Bessemer invested in Twilio and they know this, and the Otonomo team just showed them that they’re incompetent in the API space. So — I think you’ve got a bigger leg up than you think.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#115

Post by localhostdotdev » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

not sure how to formulate it but wouldn't a great execution be very hard to reproduce? looks like it's copying the external API.

also looking at the other company documentation, it's different from the screenshots: https://docs.otonomo.io/docs/getting-started (archive.org history is quite limited so may have been scrubbed)

edit: yes those "screenshots" are very disingenuous: https://smartcar.com/docs/api#introduction

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#116

Post by z0mbie42 » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

Some may call it 'outsourcing'.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#117

Post by asmithmd1 » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

novaleaf wrote: post #101

What kind of tools are used to create API Docs like this? I made a dev-focused SaaS and struggle to find a good way to document API's directly via the codebase, so that code changes can be reflected automatically in the docs.

I think the de facto standard for creating API docs based on code is to use https://swagger.io/

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#118

Post by jbverschoor » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

Does this mean I can sell a car and then unlock (steal) it? :)

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#119

Post by alexnewman » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

At a certain startup i worked at, we decided to rip off some random strings from a competitors docs, solely to make them think we ripped them off. In truth, we started on the product at the same time of them and waited for them to launch first to use their press and marketing against them.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#120

Post by frosted-flakes » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

perfunctory wrote: post #81

"is illegally cloning our product" isn't it for the court to establish?

No. If I photocopy the Harry Potter books, change the name on the covers, and sell them as my own, that is obviously illegal. This is the same thing, and nobody needs to wait for the courts to say that it is illegal.