[drabie]

Honestly, you don't. You just need to focus on building something that people want and making sure that the experience you deliver is better than any other.

Further, if you start to think about your hardware as a means of delivering something else (for us, that's food), then getting copycatted on the hardware won't be as hard to deal with from a business standpoint.

[Hykso]

+1 with the boys above! By the time someone replicates you, you should have an improved version of your stuff on both software and hardware.

[hongquan]

Depends on your development cycle, but this is one area that startups should have an advantage over bigger competitors. We got copied on a few things (logo, tagline, product) by a bunch of people in 3, 6, 9 months time. Of course we're already working on our second model, so no worries!