The fact that their blog is now down with a database error does not exactly inspire much confidence.
So one of them snags the source from Highrise and changes some images around. I'm sure he previewed it, it looked fine and he published it. He probably forgot to change out the button images because they looked fine.
Who knows if this is how it happened, but it really seems like it could have been an honest (but definitely pretty stupid) mistake.
Edit: Not sure why this is getting downvoted, anyone care to explain? Action in startups is not always deliberate.
I would bet money there is not one web designer here who has never taken a tiny snippet from another site. It's kinda more of a matter of the quantity of content that they took. Plus the hot linking was especially dumb.
For full disclosure, I'm a young entrepreneur (<25), run a company that was started a few months after curebit (my cofounder applied and interviewed for the same YC class with a different idea), have raised pretty close to what curebit has raised, and am also a 500startups-funded company.
I'd just like to take a minute to hope that a couple of screw ups by others won't put companies like ours at a disadvantage. It makes me sad to think that "how old are you guys" is one of the first questions someone would ask, since I'm not sure physical age has anything to do with how people react to different situations. I'd sure like to think that if I screwed up people would chalk it up to me being me and not my generation.
I also hope people realize the big mouth investor with no taste (especially in what he wears ;) isn't the only person vetting 500startup companies. He has a whole investment team. Yes, Dave does pick a lot of the 500s companies himself (he was our biggest advocate), but the entire 500s team has a say. I also think you're overlooking the fact that curebit was also supported by YCombinator (and Dave has a lot of respect for PG's team and the companies they accept).
I don't condone what curebit did (far from it). I am close to positive someone at YC would have at least helped hash out ideas for design (and 500s' mantra is design, data, distribution), and, Dave has always said: running lean doesn't mean running cheap. But I hope that what one company does doesn't ruin it for the rest of us.
I knew that if I just asked "how old are you?" it would come off as a snarky comment on the situation. That's why I also included "Not making a judgement, genuinely just wondering."
While I wasn't trying to tie age to the issue at hand, I would have to disagree with your assertion that physical age doesn't have anything to do with how people react to different situations. Maybe experience is the real driver but obviously that is closely related to age. Either way that's neither here nor there.
As for the rest of your comment, I'm not totally clear on what you were trying to get across or who you were responding to but it still doesn't seem like it deserved to be down voted.
regardless, we don't shy away from helping our founders, even should they go astray. not proud right now, but we hope to be helpful where possible.
live & learn.
Proper apologies have three parts: 1) What I did was wrong. 2) I’m sorry that I hurt you. 3) How do I make it better? It’s the third part that people tend to forget…. Apologize when you screw up and focus on other people, not on yourself.
This has stuck with me and I noticed you were following on it very well, patiently and with humbleness.
This is beyond the pale and it is not a case of 'live and learn'. Every single one of us as developers have taken the page layouts of others, even looked at their code and then coded something ourselves based around it. What you don't do is list layout code straight and insert your own images and URLs. I take it you're investing enough to employ people with HTML, CSS and front-end skills?
Will you throw some funding at me please?
The only way to try and stop it is to prevent people being able to create a new a/c from an ip address they were using to login with on their proper account. (and maybe penalize them for trying).
That's probably a fruitless effort though with proxies et al.
We had a different homepage, were a/b testing different pages, came across the 37signals post and were like 'wow we should see how that converts!' We are big fans of rails and what 37signals is doing and did not really think through the implications of what we were doing. We just kind of thought about it as a fun test to run.
Clearly it was stupid. It was not meant to offend anyone and we are adding credit where due. (We'll take it down if DHH insists!)
Our new designer will take a crack at more than our homepage... we need all our UI "designed".. not redesigned, but designed - because we're primarily backend guys. Yes, this landing page variation was heavily inspired (read: blatantly ripped off) from Highrise -- because these are the peeps we aspire to, and they've done a lot of testing to figure out what works: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes...
We're running a "ghetto test" - this homepage variant does not even share a common CSS file with the rest of the code base. It's been live less than a week.
The idea was to just see how the conversion characteristics were before investing a lot of time into making a "real design" out of the lessons (prominent testimonial, light copy focused on value props). Hence the hot linking, inline styles, etc. It is personally my fault for not including a credit to Highrise for the design.. that credit is well deserved and will be added shortly - a big oversight on my part.. we launch some stuff fast (other things deliberately), and this was one of those fast things.
Lesson to us: add credits, and be more explicit what we're testing... ask permission instead of asking for forgiveness. In the meantime, please forgive us? :)
It is personally my fault for not including a credit to Highrise for the design
Lesson to us: add credits
Crediting someone for their property doesn't make stealing it ok. By default, stealing is wrong. Waiting for an objection and/or linking to the owner doesn't change that. This seems like a problematic worldview for a young company.
YC gives you money, but they apparently do not provide you with advisors, handlers, lawyers or PR people who will intervene to stop you from making such a boneheaded, potentially explosive move, nor step in and help you figure out how to gracefully recover from a mistake.
Seriously? Credit where credit is due? Ha ha, it was stupid, we stole your design AND your assets, hee, aren't we a trip, funding, something something, TechCrunch, split testing makes it alllll better.
When they invite you to their program or (better yet) get you more funding, it probably feels like a mandate. Which makes things so much worse without guidance.
You are still not planning on taking it down, just adding a credit to their site?
I personally would never use a service that has this level of integrity, I wouldn't trust any of my information with it.
And, since you've admitted to stealing their site straight up - it might be "willful and deliberate", it could be considered a criminal act.
I'm no lawyer - but one probably wrote this: http://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/penalties.html
You going to take that down also?
But the part about stealing someone else's work and passing it off as your own obviously had some thought put into it. One could only imagine what other parts of your app were repurposed from third parties.
However, I think something that is missing is a little more guidance. Other than the issues others have communicated, the web page showed that your company hasn't established, even in very raw form, it's own style that is best for its users. It's normal to reflect and be inspired by others designs. I would even recommend that you take screenshots of the design styles that speak to you. From that point though, the screen shots should be used as "internal" discussion materials that help your company find the essence of its own style. That style should always be taking what's best for your product/service and user base, into the style characteristics.
Once you've found your core style, express it and iterate over it using each iteration as a piece of more relavent inspiration to your style (37Signals recently released a cool video on their blog that demonstrates this process through their eyes). The results should make you proud enough to express and share it with your customers. Only at that point do you finally make it public. After that keep iterating over it. If you utilize external inspiration, make sure that you've iterated over it enough that your style doesn't feel like a knockoff. You should be able to identify this easily and odds are, if you've been going through all this it won't be. However, if you have concerns just take screen shots of your style and the screen shots of what externally inspired you,...show them to some people who don't work for your company and weren't involved with the design process. They should be able to 1) pick up on your style and 2) agree that it isn't a knockoff. Given the situation you are in, I would recommend this heavily to help give piece of mind.
I realize that you wanted to gain from the lessons learned from 37Signals internal design iteration process as well as other companies. However, if you note what I said above, it means they were focusing "also" on their product and their customers. Which means if you directly reflect your design from theirs, you weren't focusing enough on your customers. You might have intended to give your customers a great design experience, but without going through the process above, your website is considered not authentic...and as a result people focus on the their feeling of "this looks oddly familiar" instead of focusing on what your product can do for them.
Many, if not all of the people who have commented have gone through their own artistic design process to build one or more designs. And at times it can be "hell" (fun, but still) to create something that the designer feels is good enough to share/use. It is a compliment that someone is inspired by your design. But when it's closer to a knockoff it can make the designer feel like they sacrificed him/her-self for your free ride. If they intended for it to be given away, then the benefit you receive gives them whatever good feeling they were looking for. I'm sure you have, like many people, worked insane hours that took away from family, friends, and even yourself.
I hope humility, honesty, and hard work guide your company to a design that you can be proud of.
Good luck and I hope this all helps.
I do have to say, based on the evidence that DHH keeps unearthing, it does not seem like your company has put forth the immediate effort needed to represent that your company is taking to heart what is being said by DHH and others. That unfortunately is effectively like a strike 2. First for the action, and secondly for the inaction. Yes the inaction is both in relation to PR and actual outcome of change.
For the future viability of your company, you might consider immediately removing all content and styles even remotely considered to be "borrowed" (by any definition)...even if it means your websites are bland and almost blank. That however only closes the door on any indiscretions. Going through the challenges of repentance and acquiring forgiveness, is something only your company's heart can achieve. Seeking guidance would also probably be a good idea to get you through this current PR issue.
On your twitter pic it shows that you wish to stop sopa. In a recent case, GoDaddy had their own PR problem that cost them dearly. Given that your company is a start up, even with $1.2M in funding, appropriately negative PR like this can cost the company it's life.
*PS: 37Signals has 2 good books to read. I believe "Rework" even has some comments regarding when you screw up as a company. However, since it is the authors themselves to which your company has afflicted....
I hope your company is able to make the right choices.
"Please note: What works for us may not work for you. Please do your own testing. Your conversion rates may suffer if you copy us."
As for duplicating the layout and taking the concepts, that's fair game in my opinion. The actual graphics should not be stolen and re-used.
So yeah -- Founder Dating works. If you're looking for a cofounder, check out the Founder Dating event in SF on April 27th. Apply by April 15th.
Ultimately this is up to the user, but our goal is to expose our observations about what works to our customers to make it easier.
The referral happening is just an action - so a SaaS company using it could easily provide credit, as with Dropbox. You could provide a callback URL for us to notify you when the referral happens, but we handle all the tracking, url generation, analytics, split testing, etc. Check out the custom integration instructions: http://www.curebit.com/integration#custom
Some of our stores (mypuppypads.com) delay the offer by a week - giving their customers a chance to first try the product.
In other cases, like when Six Orange Grove runs a Charlie's Soap deal (these always go super viral), there's no need to delay the offer. The people that buy & share are die-hard Charlie's Soap fans that stockpile it whenever it goes on sale: http://twitter.com/#!/kakaty/statuses/4377656799793152 http://twitter.com/#!/myfirstkitchen/statuses/43714330105036...
However... there is an intriguing idea that you might be more successful by only doing it the dropbox way. It seems counterintuitive to restrict your options, but then you really would be productizing the dropbox approach - you'd be offering not only the implementation of it, but also a guide to it, an explanation for why it works etc. Not technology, but valuable business guidance. It would also be simpler and more convenient, by being less customizable to use; and more definite and concrete in your marketing materials, making it easier to understand and pass on, and be stickier.
But developers hate artificially limiting their technology; and I'm far from able to guarantee it would sell better (or, indeed, at all).
I guess you could simulate it, by having a form/wizard, that guides the user through the issues of a dropbox-style referral - sort of like "referral model advice" - but one that ideally would also create the system on the spot! I'm thinking that many people have much less idea of referral programs than you do (and value their ignorance); making the choices simpler is a big plus for these folk. Of course, I don't know if referral systems are well-understood enough yet to be reduced to simple rules that always work (or work reasonably reliably, well enough for a first iteration for the client).
Now our product vision is to offer a small variety of simple models proven to work well, to get people started. But we also let hackers tweak stuff so it can work more seamlessly with their products.
Allan
re: ethics, if we look at curebit as a platform that's encouraging more ethical referrals (by focusing on pre-built social network relationships and encouraging retailers to use best practices), we shouldn't expect them to have to limit their growth by forcing early users into unfamiliar patterns in order to be the moral police on anyone wanting to try their platform.
Fucking programmers.
Somehow I doubt an iPad being clutched in the doctor's bosom as they read it is anymore a violation than that.
The actual apology:Recently we launched a site with several pages copied from 37signals' Highrise. We did more than take inspiration from their design - we actually used html & css code, and hotlinked to images on their site. We apologize to David and 37signals for ripping off their work. It was stupid, lazy, and disrespectful of their creative efforts. It's particularly painful for us to have done this to 37signals because they are big heroes of ours. We just hope they will accept our apologies.