This is not how we were hoping to spend our day here. A bit more digging through old Figma files than beers and cheers, but let's do this once and put it to rest.
We launched on Product Hunt today (Aug 12th) and started getting a few messages about similarities to Oku that had launched on Product Hunt a few weeks before. We had actually planned to launch on July 27, but decided to wait when we saw Oku launch on the 22nd to avoid the noise. Apparently, the extra couple of weeks wait wasn't enough.
Some of the feedback we got today went pretty quickly from "why should I use Literal over the Oku?" to "you ripped Oku off!!!" and some other pretty low blows on Twitter.
We've been working on Literal since early 2020 and registered Literal.club in May '20. Here's some screenshots with the version history date-stamp of what we were doing at the time.
I'm not sure when Oku started, but I got an invite to Readng.co (Oku's name at the time) on May 4th 2020 and reached out to Aziz to have a chat about it after seeing just how similar our two products were.
We had a call together with Piet and I came away from it with a few thoughts:
Based on the last point, we came to the conclusion that even though we had some shared core functionality, our paths would diverge on a long enough timeline because of different business models.
In terms of offering, most of what each of us are doing today is not unique to be honest. It's years of chipping away at the product from the folks at Goodreads. None of us invented currently reading, want to read, feeds, collections/shelves, reading goals, highlights, etc. All of it is available today on Goodreads. For the most feature rich product in this space today, go there.