[wyldstallyn26]

Thanks doomlaser. With little money (especially back in September), it's incredibly risky to innovate, and in today's world, everything is a derivative of the other in some form. e.g., Facebook from MySpace, Lamborghini from Ferrari. Talking Gremlin was exactly this, on a smaller scale.

This is our philosophy: Find a successful business -> Discover as much as possible about it -> Re-implement it all -> Then battle them for supremacy. Having an enemy brings out our primal instincts. Boom. :)

[gravitronic]

Very smart. Your goal is not to innovate, it's to succeed.

This is very important as it's counter to the common belief that success is based on having a "new" idea instead of just taking over an existing market.

[doomlaser]

Cloning a fluff entertainment app doesn't really bother me, but I come from a games background, and the app store is rife with shady cloning of full games that follow a monetization model similar to yours.

I have a couple that have had two of their games completely cloned, and filled with cheap 'casual appeal' graphics (one of which made it to #7 on the app store). I find this a kind of dirty way to make money.

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/221862/hey-thats-my-fish...

[n9com]

Perhaps, but unless you're someone like Steve Jobs you're not going to come out with a TOTALLY new idea that no one in the world hasn't done or thought of already. Even Disney ripped off Kimba to make Lion King. http://www.hemmy.net/2007/04/28/disney-lion-king-ripped-off-...

If someone is stealing your ideas and executing better than you, then maybe you need to find out what they are doing right, so your next game does just as well or better than the clones.

[trussi]

You get even more bang for your buck if you combine two existing products.

Combine HootSuite and SocialOomph and you have a rockstar Twitter manager.

Synergy is a wonderful thing.