What to Do When Someone Copies Your Business

Hey guys, Matt Paulson here. In this video I want to talk about an issue that seems to come up every few months in my businesses and that's copycats. Somebody has tried to copy every successful business that I've ever owned. When MarketBeat operated under its old brand, the name was Analyst Ratings Network and our domain name was analystratings.net and somebody forked over the money for analystratings.com and made a nearly identical website. There was another time somebody tried to copy Markabee where they even copied the words off of her emails on our website to try to create just a very similar rip off website. Recently there's a guy that bought a domain name very similar to MarketBeat. It was like MarketBeatttoday.com or something like that. I don't even remember what it was. But they had actually bought advertising on our website for their domain that had MarketBeat in it. You know, we've had people try to copy Go GoPhoto contest, very identical business model. But then it would change from gogophoto contest to like hello, photo contest or something just very similar. So we've been copied a lot. You know, I can't count the number of times that people have made a copy of my entrepreneurs with True Falls Facebook group. You know, there are at least 10 copycats of that Facebook group on Facebook. So people will say, oh, I'm going to make a Facebook group just like that. Except I'm not going to focus on entrepreneurs. I'm going to focus on small business owners or I'm going to make an entrepreneurs of Sioux Falls Facebook group. But I'm going to broaden it and make it entrepreneurs of South Dakota or entrepreneurs of some other place. That does seem to happen a lot, but those groups never seem to get a lot of traction. I feel like I've got a lot of experience with copycat, so maybe that uniquely equips me to talk about this issue. The unfortunate reality is that anything that's successful is going to be copied by somebody else. Some people just don't think that they can come up with an original idea that people find valuable. So they copy something that already exists and then they just try to make their own version of it, maybe with a little bit of a twist. Most of the time copying other businesses doesn't work out. And the reason is that when you try to copy a business, you can only copy the parts of the business that are visible. So you can copy their website, you can copy their email campaigns, you can copy maybe what their product looks like. But you can't copy the stuff behind the scenes that isn't visible to customers. So you can't see all the processes and thoughts and ideas and technology that goes into running their businesses behind the scenes. You don't necessarily know what the X factor is that makes that business successful. The business you're trying to copy could have unique sourcing for the products or marketing strategies that you just can't copy. You also don't have the same skills, knowledge and relationships as the person that made the business that you're trying to copy. And just because a business was successful when it was first started, say five or 10 years ago, doesn't mean creating that same business today will be successful. For example, creating a network of blogs was a great idea in 2004 when Jason Calacanis made Web Blogs Inc. A big exit sold to AOL for 40 million. But you would never try to do that today because the content has moved away from blogs and to social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you wanted to build a big audience today around a topic, you wouldn't do it on a blog, you would do it on Instagram. The world has changed. Just because a business worked 10 years ago doesn't mean it's going to work today. Copying businesses typically doesn't work. So if you see somebody else that has a business and you love it and you want to create something that's very similar to identical to it, you should really step back and say, you know, is this really what I want to do? Do I really want to copy somebody's business? Do I really understand how it works? Do I really know what it's going to take to make a different, successful version of the business? And I think most times the answer is no. So what should you do if somebody does try to copy your business? Your first natural inclination is to be mad at the person for copying and stealing your idea and trying to profit off of your creation. It's very natural to feel this way. But spending a lot of time being angry about a copycat probably isn't going to help either you or your business. In most cases, I think the answer is probably to ignore it and then just get back to work. In all likelihood, your copycat won't be successful anyway. Your copycat will work on the idea for a month and then they'll just give up when they don't get anywhere. I think this is what happens in about 90% of cases for copycats. In all likelihood, the copycat is just going to have no impact on your business. And any time that you spend worrying about your copycat will just slow you down and it's going to take up head space that could have otherwise gone to thinking about how you can grow your business. So if you spend time worrying about somebody that copies your business, being mad at them, or trying to stop them from copying you, usually you're only distracting yourself from building your own business. The one scenario maybe you should take some action on is when somebody tries to intentionally create brand confusion and try to steal your customers. So if your name brand is MarketBeat and you're MarketBeat.com and somebody makes MarketBeat.net and tries to pretend to be you, that's a problem. You don't want somebody to have a bad experience with a different company and have them think that they were doing business with your company when they weren't. The way to protect yourself from that is really just by trademarking the name of your business and trademarking all of your key product names. So my company has a trademark for MarketBeat in many of the categories in news and financial services. So if somebody makes another website, a podcast or blog, or an app called MarketBeat, my lawyer can go after them and get them to stop. There is actually a major financial company that's hundreds of times bigger than we are that launched a podcast called MarketBeat last year. But when we sent them a polite letter saying, hey, we've got a trademark on this, you can't use it, they instantly changed the name of the podcast to something else when they saw that we had a trademark. So if you're worried about somebody using a business name that's identical to yours or very similar to yours, just trademark the name of your business and then you'll legally own that name. Own the name of your business in the category of business that you are in so nobody else can use it. So with the trademark, you have to trademark it in specific categories. Or somebody could make a pet store called MarketBeat, but they couldn't make a financial news service called MarketBeat because we own it in that category. So if somebody's copied your business, just don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. Ultimately, you're spending a lot of time worrying about a copycat. It's just going to make you mad, maybe when you don't need to be mad, and it just won't help your business grow. So stay focused on what you're building, don't give credence to copycats, and just let them be what they are, which is their wannabes. Hopefully you enjoyed this video. I'm trying to do two a week every week. This year, I'm putting them out on my YouTube channel first. So if you want to get these videos as soon as they come out, go to YouTube, type in business Talk with Matthew Paulsen, click the subscribe button, and click the notifications icon. And that way you'll make sure you never miss one of these videos. Thanks, guys.