Ask HN: YC company copied our product, what can we do?

Also sorry I am not good reading the signals - why would being a female founder make you angrier than a non female founder? Id be angry as F too if a clone of my hard work appeared out of no where!

It was a public community slack channel. There may have been proprietary/protected information shared in there but in my naive opinion (NAL!) that wouldn't be protected by trade secrets if it was shared publicly. Some things could still be protected by copyright or trademark but it's pretty unlikely. It's possible copying the API could be infringing but Google v. Oracle[0] makes that a very uphill battle.

"Secret sauce" is highly valued by founders and product managers but IMHO it's generally overvalued and doesn't constitute a moat. For the most part, competitors are allowed to copy most things and leverage whatever other advantages they have over the original innovators.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

Focus on your differentiator/USP and providing the best service to your customers. Any decent and obvious market has copycats and competitors.

Any code that's written from scratch is automatically assigned copyright to the creator or their employer at the time of creation. API's are probably considered copyrighted by the courts but getting any kind of remedy for that will be exceedingly difficult after Google vs. Oracle.

> Id be angry as F too if a clone of my hard work appeared out of no where!

This happens literally all the time. I wouldn't recommend someone be a founder if this upsets them. No half-decent innovation isn't instantly cloned by 10 fly-by-night copycats and multiple large incumbents.