Today, I accidentally saw the article of Wu Liang, founder of APP “You are really good-looking today” on Zhihu. In this story, Alibaba is the Forty thieves. What happened to him, it really shocked us.
The reason for the shock is that we don’t need to judge whether Wu liang’s story is true or not, because we were robbed in the exact same way before them.. We are also a small company quietly starting up in the field of maternal and child health care for more than 4 years. “Little carp parenting” is our product. This product is mainly aimed at Chinese parents of babies, and carries out a series of healthy development tests for babies. The health evaluation of small carp is based on a variety of authoritative standards at home and abroad. Meanwhile, by cooperating with top experts on child development in China, we independently studied algorithms based on big data, and delivered the child development evaluation that could only be conducted in doctors’ offices to parents. The most important part of children’s growth and development evaluation is not one evaluation, but continuous record and comprehensive evaluation. The biggest difference between little carp parenting and the current height and weight recording software on the market is that we will comprehensively evaluate various evaluation indicators and development trends through our own intellectual property algorithm polished in four years, and give health suggestions. So far we have served nearly 5 million babies in China. This is not an article to promote the little carp, but to explain our product positioning in the market. As early as 2014, we got the software copyright certificate of our product.
Without further ado, in March this year we received a phone call from someone claiming to be from Ali Health. He said that he saw our child development assessment tool was unique and hoped to communicate and cooperate. For a start-up company like us, it is certainly gratifying for a big MAC like BAT to see our products, so we began to cooperate and communicate with them. Frankly speaking, during most of the cooperation and communication, we can feel that ali people are very dedicated and positive. Most of the Ali people we met were polite, honest and efficient. We were even more in awe of the company when we saw a reminder on the screen during a meeting with Ali.
Due to the excellent quality of our products and unique design, our cooperation and communication on products went smoothly in the early stage. Although there are some differences in the specific demands of the two sides in the cooperation, we communicate candidly and seek win-win solutions. During this period, ali’s colleagues also gave us a lot of valuable suggestions and assisted us to complete the corresponding preparation within ali system. We really feel that alibaba can become the most valuable company in China and still maintain high growth is not lucky! Through efficient communication, we basically reached the cooperation intention at the end of March. At that time, Ali Health hoped to put the evaluation tool cooperated with us on The line by Mid-April. Because the cooperation agreement has been reviewed by Ali for a long time, and out of the trust of Ali, we agree to give priority to technical cooperation. Our basic technical cooperation plan is that ali Health will re-implement the front end by referring to our product design, and the back end will invoke the little Carp interface and adopt the little carp exclusive algorithm to realize the evaluation provided by users in mobile Taobao. To speed things up, we even gave each other the front-end code for the profiling tool and how to plot the growth curve on March 27.
At the same time, we made an appointment with Ali to meet the person in charge of this project in Hangzhou on March 28th. The person we met is exactly the same as Wu Liang. In today’s story, Ali is one of the forty Thieves. In this meeting, we mainly communicated about business cooperation, during which we did have some differences. However, as a start-up company, we did not ask for too high a return. Therefore, we confirmed to the other side that we could give up other requirements as long as we could promote the brand of Little Carp. A few days later, however, he received a reply to terminate the cooperation.
Originally, this was just an episode. Although we made some efforts to cooperate with this cooperation in March, it is not a big deal if business is not good for business. Let’s just keep working on our own.
Unexpectedly, on the eve of May Day, we received a phone call from the person in charge, to the effect that after comparison, they still think our products are more competitive, so they would like to communicate and cooperate with us again. And he sent us the cooperation agreement on May 2nd.
At the same time, they asked us to provide a specific operation solution according to their requirements. We sent out this plan on May 5th, and proposed to go to Hangzhou for an interview. On 11 May, after repeated urging, we again received an unequivocal refusal to cooperate from the person in charge.
Both times, the other party took the initiative to come to talk about cooperation. We were rejected twice when we fully cooperated with each other. To tell the truth, I must be unhappy in my heart. However, we can understand that cooperation is a matter of mutual interest and big companies may have more issues to consider. So we don’t see it as a big deal. The past is the past. But the story is not over. In late June, we found out that the baby development measurement tool was online at My Health. There was nothing wrong with this page. We knew ali had other plans for not working with us, and this feature was definitely what they wanted. However, after opening the evaluation tool, we were shocked to find that this is a complete copy of the product logic and design ideas of little carp parenting. Although due to the lack of the core algorithm, and rushed online, the function is much weaker than the little carp parenting evaluation, the design is also extremely crude, but a clear eye can see that this is a copy of the evaluation tool based on the little carp.
Let’s have a look below:
Due to the lack of the core algorithm of small carp, there is no head circumference evaluation and development trend evaluation in the evaluation tool of Handamoy, and the comprehensive evaluation is too simple. However, the core functional structure and design of the whole product are completely derived from the baby carp. After the analysis of the page, the whole secondary page of the evaluation tool is under the domain name Haoyunma.com, and the technical scheme is consistent with what we discussed at that time. The domain name is “Good X Mom,” which also has its own parenting app. But if you open up the Good X Mom app, you can see their own development tracking tool looks like this.
First, the design bears no resemblance at all to that provided for hand cleaning, and second, there are no developmental assessments or recommendations.
We’re pretty much completely clear by now. Ali health fully understood the design concept, product logic, and even front-end page code of the little carp parenting product accumulated for many years through cooperation negotiations. Then they casually find a reason to refuse to cooperate with us, such as the original product company, find a company I don’t know what relationship to help them copycat xiao Lei’s work, and then brazenly to taobao hundreds of millions of users to provide services.
Is this the true image of alibaba’s success as a company that countless people respect and aspire to?
We don’t really want to believe it. After all, it can be said that Alibaba has changed the life of almost every Chinese today. It should not be a company that takes pride in copying and copying and has no bottom line.
Of course, it is difficult to say who copied who is not suitable for Internet products, as a giant into some of their favorite areas, generally speaking, the first small companies only obediently surrender.
But using this method, defraud the core product ideas and even code of the start-up company, and then naked plagiarism, this kind of eating is too ugly, right? !
When we found out, everyone in the company was speechless for a long time. What could we do?
Get a lawyer to Sue for plagiarism? Defrauding trade secrets? Useful? !
We are just a small company working day and night to provide excellent products and services for millions of mother and baby users. We don’t have the time, energy or money to engage in this kind of prolonged bickering.
And it is difficult for us to avoid dealing with the ubiquitous Ali ecology in the future. Is it really good for us to fight for this?
So we put up with it, we can only console ourselves: doing our own thing well is king..
Unexpectedly, today saw another company almost exactly the same as ours to say it out loud. So there are probably countless other startups that are being robbed in the same way!
That being the case, we cannot and should not remain silent. Maybe this practice is not inspired by ali’s senior management, or maybe it is just the bottomless behavior of some people under THE KPI assessment. But since we are not the only victims, we should stand up and speak the truth.
We don’t have any claims, we don’t ask for compensation, and we don’t even think about taking their product offline. After all, the Development of Internet products is fast, if it is really beneficial to users, how can continue to provide services for users?
Our only thought is that this sordid practice should be brought to light, though it may still be useless.
Jack Ma said at alibaba’s annual meeting: “What saddens me most is to hear outside that Ali people are now arrogant, ali people are now arrogant, Ali people think they can do anything…
Now I think some people really can do anything…
If you want to see what kind of evaluation tool little carp is, you can click here to see the evaluation of baby development on mobile Taobao, you can click “my”, scroll down, click “my health”, choose “parenting”, and then you should be able to see it