Imitation: From Flattery to… Misunderstanding
Last week we had a meeting with a potential business partner. I will not comment on the company in question or the meeting itself. I would, however, like to discuss a question we were asked by the CEO of the company towards the end of the meeting.
As I mentioned in a previous post, one of our team members chose to leave us roughly one week after Bookups came to life during Startup Weekend Bucharest. He started a Bookups of his own — name, idea, motto & all. However, his resulting product is of extremely low quality and we never considered it to be serious direct competition.
And that is why the CEO’s question seemed the more shocking. It went something like this: Since you have this direct competitor, will you be rebranding any time soon?. For the first split second, I did not take the question seriously, but it became obvious that she was truly expecting an answer. So my answer was: Are you f***ing kidding me? Don’t worry, it was all in my head, I didn’t actually verbalize any of it. But I would have loved to see my own expression — was it the mix of shock and hilarity I imagined it would be, or did I manage to conceal my feelings? I guess I will never know.
My business partner managed, as always, to produce the perfectly diplomatic response: we had been through the branding process, everything about Bookups — name, motto, discourse, logo etc — had been very well thought out. Nothing was random or accidental.
The process of finding a name is still fresh in my mind: I wanted something that clearly pointed to books, but that would also imply action, instead of being static. We wanted a short name, easily remembered. It was the middle of the night when the names Bookup and Sherlock popped into my head. (The rationale behind the name Sherlock came from our vision of our platform as a means of discovering other people through the clues offered by books.) We eventually settled on Bookups, and the motto: Follow the book. Discover the people.
The search for a logo took us more than two months of brainstorming and soul-searching between the two of us and a talented designer. It was an intensely creative and intellectually-challenging journey, which I detailed in a separate post.
So why exactly do I have such a big issue with the CEO’s question? It’s simple: because it violates the unwritten laws of entrepreneurship and startup culture.
First of all, while I understand a company’s concern for a potential partnership which might raise issues of competition or even controversy, they should carry out some basic research beforehand. It doesn’t take too much talent or effort to notice which startup imitates which, or whose product is better, or which executes an idea with greater creativity and panache. In our case, it was obvious they did no such research.
Second of all, most startups which are up to some good get copycats or even clones. It’s a free market and no regulations are in place to protect ideas or even the means of execution. All you have as your own is the culture of your company: the mission and the core values. While these may be copy-pasted (as it was the case with us) from one website to the other, they are not reproducible. They remain empty words because what copycats and imitators fail to understand is that your company’s mission and values are just a representation of a thought-process, of days spent pushing the boundaries and searching beyond the horizon, of a journey of discovery which they will never be able to replicate.
If someone starts wearing the same clothes as you, behaving like you, talking like you, would you consider changing yourself? Or would you stay true to your own character which has been shaped by your personal experiences, by the victories and failures you have had so far? If we as much as consider rebranding ourselves simply because we have an imitator, what does that say about our character?
I had this fantasy that by the end of this text I would arrive at a more grown-up, argumentative answer to the CEO’s question. But alas, I see no reason for it. All I managed to do was progress from a response which ended in a question mark, to one that ends sharply and unapologetically in a full stop:
You’ve got to be f***ing kidding me.
