[muzani]

No. If it were easy, lots of people have already done it earlier. I've never seen a pure copycat do well; anyone who is copying features instead of talking to customers rarely understands it enough to build better products.

Even if someone does copy you, it grows the market, at least for startups. Fashion buildings are often located next to each other, as well as book stores, hardware stores, and so on. Startups have a problem with market awareness, so the more competitors the better. Competitors also greatly reduce the cost of failure - being close to a competitor gives you the option of mergers, acquisitions, and maybe even getting a high level job within one should you fail.

You can look at companies like Rocket Internet, which is the best in the business at this. But they have high fail rates, and have failed to outdo Airbnb and Uber. They also look at fields that are easy to throw money at and large markets, like e-commerce, ride hailing, food delivery, groceries, meal prep. Unless yours is a trillion dollar industry, it probably won't be tackled by someone competent.

However, there is one thing you should worry about - domain name squatters.

[hgl]

> Even if someone does copy you, it grows the market, at least for startups.

Thanks for showing me a totalizing view. This is another thing I should keep in mind.

> No. If it were easy, lots of people have already done it earlier. I've never seen a pure copycat do well. > Unless yours is a trillion dollar industry, it probably won't be tackled by someone competent.

When I saw the first the argument, I was gonna say Apple is one, and it beat Xerox spectacularly (I'd hazard it was a pure copycat, the whole selling point of Mac was the GUI), but the second told me I wouldn't have such a mighty competitor since I certainly don't have an original idea like that and is definitely not in the trillion dollar industry. But I think a competitor as at much lower level of competence can still make me nervous.

Let's do a thought experiment. Let's say I anticipate IPv6 support will be a highly requested feature, yet I don't really understand it well to implement related features. Should I make myself well-versed in IPv6 before release a MVP (could take a long time)? Or release it first but then spending a lot of time learning it and make users wait, giving competitors opportunities to implement it first (I think many many developers/teams are well-versed in IPv6).

Making users wait is itself another concern I mentioned in the earlier reply.

[muzani]

I think it's fine to make users wait, or even give them a poor experience. I usually go for things were users have already hacked together a solution; the alternative is that they keep hacking even if they'd rather just outsource the work to someone else. If you're working in a field where plenty of competitors have IPv6 support, then copying isn't really your main problem.

You could simply release it first, then add support later when there are a lot of complaints on it. My preferred approach is to avoid paid marketing until there are no more complaints, but launching should happen early to collect complaints.

[cheeseblubber]

Correct me if im wrong but Xerox wasn't an apple competitor. Wozinak tried very hard to convince Xerox to go in to the computer space but they didn't decide to. Also Apple became a trillion dollar company not because of the idea but by execution.