Milestone reached!

 We have our first copycat

John Papadakis
2 min readJan 27, 2014
cop·y·cat(kŏp′ē-kăt′) .One that closely imitates or mimics another.

My name is John, co-founder of Pollfish.

Pollfish enables app developers to monetize their apps with surveys and provides real-time data to researchers for market research purposes.

Cool right?

Since the model is validated we expected companies to try something similar, but what you are about to see may be illegal in some States ☺

We started Pollfish at January 2013, launched to the public at May 2013. Currently we access more than 11,000,000 smartphone users from hundreds of Android and iOS apps that provide real-time consumer insights to our clients.

The copycat

So this startup shows up … monetizing mobile apps with surveys. That’s great, competition always matures the market. So I checked their website.. they not only copied the entire model, they copied our old website too.

You can see our old website (May 1st) at WayBackMachine .

Find the Differences (Tip they are not that many…)

Copy paste 101

It was for real

At first I though that this was a joke. Maybe someone from the team wasted $10 for a domain name to pull a prank. That was not the case…

So what do I think about it?

I love it. I really do. Wouldn't you?

What should I do?

Since they are trying so “hard” to imitate us I’m looking for ways to ease the process.

What do you think would be the best approach?

  • Send them our source code?
  • Provide them the PSD files? (heck… take it anyway)
  • Introduce them to our investors and clients?

Follow the discussion on HN

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John Papadakis

Software developer, Gold Olympic, illusionist, founder @pollfish