This reminds me of a funny story.

I am using a service called Invoicely for recurring invoices in my small business. One day I randomly googled for some of its features and found a post of a guy who claimed (and I believe him) that Invoicely is a blatant screen-by-screen clone of their own SaaS.

I felt really bad for that guy, and after some time I thought that it's a good idea to switch to them. The problem: their website name is so difficult to remember, I never got around to actually opening an account there.

Some shifty guys literally copied an existing service up to their Javascript and CSS, and improved it dramatically just by giving it a name I can remember.

Hiveage is the one you're talking about, there's a big post about everything they ripped off here: https://medium.com/@prabhaths/invoicely-a-hiveage-rip-off-b9...

Haha the copy-pasting part is terrible, but the name invoicely is vastly superior to a name that sounds like an allergic reaction or bees.

Nearly all the tech giants of today were not the the first in their niches; they just executed better.

So probably not cloning (making a nearly exact copy) of another product.

Yes, what are all those people copying Ferdinand Verbiest thinking...

> BTW Don't clone a successful product

You mean, like gas stations?

vk.com?

I guess we should not clone a product, but its okay to clone the idea.

I used vk.com a lot in the past and in terms of UI it was much more convenient for me than Facebook.

Same ideas, different implementations.

Coming up with a different way to solve the same problem or using ideas from other products is cool. Nothing is truly original. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, after all.

I'm talking about people who just rip-off someone else's design with adding anything original.