Same hero layout, same three-step section, and two paragraphs of my copy with the nouns swapped. Pricing is one dollar under mine.
I know the standard answer is 'execution matters, not ideas'. I would still like to know if there is anything worth actually doing here, or if the correct move is to close the tab and go back to work.
Before anything else, go buy their thing. Genuinely. Mine turned out to have a signup form that errored, a checkout that went to a dead price, and a product screenshot that was my screenshot with a different logo pasted over the corner. It stopped feeling like a threat after about four minutes, and I had a much clearer view of what to say if a customer ever asked me about them.
Nine days is not a copy of your product, it is a copy of your landing page. Those are extremely different objects. They have zero customers, no support history, no idea why any of the decisions in the flow are shaped the way they are, and now they are also committed to your positioning, which is probably not even right yet.
The worst outcome here is you spending two weeks of energy on them instead of on the thing that actually compounds.
Half agree. The energy cost is the real damage and you are right about that. But there is one asymmetric move worth ten minutes: put your customers' logos or names or a couple of quotes on your page, if you have permission. A clone can copy your words. It cannot copy the six people who agreed to be named next to them.
Ship the parts that cannot be copied in nine days. Imports, integrations, the support reply that arrives in twenty minutes, the six months of edge cases. A landing page is a weekend. The boring middle of a product is not.
I went through this in spring and changed two habits afterwards, both of which I would recommend. One, demos now show the outcome rather than the mechanism - you see the finished report, you do not see the four settings that make it good. Two, every clip has a small watermark in a corner that is annoying to crop. Neither stops a determined cloner but both raise the effort a lot, and the whole appeal of cloning is that it is cheap.
Tell your list first, in a normal tone, before a customer discovers it and wonders which of you is the copy. Two sentences is enough. People are surprisingly protective once they know they are the ones who found you first.
@endpaper_eli · 2h ago · 2 replies
The idea and the layout you cannot do anything about. The copy you can, because text you wrote is your work and lifting it verbatim is not a grey area.
Practical version: archive both pages right now so you have dated evidence, then send a short factual notice to whoever hosts them and to each directory - here is my page, here is the date, here are the paragraphs, they are identical. Directories tend to act on verbatim duplication because it makes their listings look bad, and it is much less drama than it sounds. Do not send it to the person first, they will just rewrite the copy and you will have nothing to show anyone.
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@visible_stitch · 2h ago
Archive their page as well as yours, which is the bit people miss. If they quietly reword everything after your first email you have lost the only proof that anything happened.
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