They “stole” our idea, they did it better. That’s fair play
“It’s never a waste of time if you never had a clock.”
October, 2021.
We had just rebranded. Most importantly, we even redeisgned our app and the website. It felt like a new start entirely. All the hard work by the team all came to this. The most important in-house conversation at the time was to get all of these wonderful work to users. If you built something, you need to to let people know it’s available for them to use, tell them where and how to find it as well as assist them in the use. It was time to sell.
People came with ideas and I was one of them. It actually made it into implementation. The idea looked at letting people know about our rebrand. I hinted that since our logo mark was a wordmark, we would ask users on our socials for their first names or nick names and we’d imprint our users’ names into the logo system and share with them on social media. Users are more likely to respond to personalized content. Especially when it’s coming from their fondly used product. Sounds like something simple but enough to keep the conversation going, right? Right?
After deciding to go with the wordmark idea, in-house conversation resulted in the suggestion of another idea of implementing the first idea. Rather than manually ask the users for their names and we make the name wordmarks ourselves, we agreed to create a wordmark generator. This is engineering and creativity at it’s best mix. Well, one idea is good. How about two good ideas? That’d surely be a super implementation, right? Right?
At the time, some facts that never occured to us was that this wasn’t one of those ideas you automate. This type of idea required human interaction for it to get the kind of engagement we sought on social media. Building out a wordmark generator just automates an idea that should’ve been a conversation. It turns it into a receipt generating experience. Why would a lot of people want to engage with that? Imagine you had to play a game, you had the chance of playing with a friend or playing with the system-generated opponent, which would you have gone for? Also, building out the wordmark generator also involved devoting time to design, development and bug fixes. The risk to reward ratio was in the negative. These are things you might only have learned in hindsight. So, we built and shipped the generator.
Apart from a few users who are ‘core’ fans of the product, most users / audience never had much use of the name wordmark generator. This was evident in the numbers. Tapping on a link that takes you out of your social app into another web app, entering your name and waiting to download your newly generated wordmark wasn’t that much of an experience. A few people did but compared to the number of people we expected, it didn’t hit the mark. Well, that was done, we can now move on.
But wait… Not really.
February, 2022.
It’s been about 3 months since our idea set sail and ‘did its best’. Many would’ve have forgotten. Well, no. Someone had been watching.
Another startup in the same industry also rebranded at this time and needed to stay in the conversation. Afterall, it’s important that they did. How will their users get to know they changed their name? Now, they pulled out the wordmark idea again but this time, it’d be done by them only. No automation, no generators, just a human conversation. That was it. It might even have been because of an overstretched manpower that they didn’t build their own wordmark generator. But it faired well for them.
They took everything from the placements of the design and even the backdrops. You could easily tell this was something you’ve done before but someone else is doing. The only different thing was their visual devices and, of course, the generator. It was well implemented. it did the numbers. They took an idea we implemented badly and they made it better. It’s fair play.
I copied the link to their post, took to our Slack that day and I wrote:
[Redacted] is showing us what happens when we don’t push ideas as we should. Someone else will — and even better. That’s how the market works.
All is fair…
A lot of people get fixated on ideas. Hey. How many times in the past few months have you seen squabbles online about who stole whose idea. While this article isn’t an endorsement of infringing on intellectual property rights, it’s important to note that your ideas are as important as how you get them out there. Ideas may not be unique. People think of things everytime. We haven’t come to appreciate how much goes on in the human mind in a moment.
If you don’t implement your ideas to perfection, someone else will and they’ll out compete you. These are general rules. When you set out to work on something, giving your best should be the only option. Even when you haven’t told anyone of it, assume there are other people who are either thinking of something similar or will see the faults in what you do and make it theirs but better. When you set sail, make sure you’re taking your best ships.
You know what else this story should show you? Whether AI will replace you or not.
In the past months, we’ve seen the ever-growing conversation about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what it means for the future of work. It’s everywhere you look. Everyone is talking about it. Even it’s now the next “big thing” after the emergence of the extended crypto bear market. Some might even say it’s now turned into a marketing trope for people who seek to make quick name in the technology and investment space. Venture capitalists’ (VC) money has to keep flowing. Basically, the talk of AI clouds our six senses in it’s entireity and we’re wondering if our jobs are at stake.
Going throught the experience narrated in this story only tells me one thing. The only occupations at risk will be those that never required so much human interactions all along. The lesser the need for human touch in what you do, the more likely you are to get replaced. Some roles require the best of human reasoning and discernment. Those ones will stick around longer. This paragraph won’t tell you what to do about this. There are tons of articles and videos doing that online already. This part of the article only desires to tell you what matters and what should be singled out in the current noisy space.
This has been article of a story and two instructive lessons.
Lights out.
