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I'd love to hear some reasoning behind: "not trivial, i.e. not easy to copy" Who cares if it's easy to copy? Paul Buccheit says he built the first version of

I'd love to hear some reasoning behind: "not trivial, i.e. not easy to copy" Who cares if it's easy to copy? Paul Buccheit says he built the first version of Gmail in an afternoon. Digg was famously built in fairly short order. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook-- all would be fairly trivial to clone. Less trivial to scale, obviously but... Feature-wise their V1 releases weren't that complex. If you want something that you can do in your off hours AND something that isn't easy to copy, I'd say you might have an unreasonably low opinion of hackers around the world. Surely there's nothing you could build in your off hours that a few persistent hackers couldn't clone in a few months of full-time work, is there? More on the "why should you care" front-- can you name any successful product/company that succeeded cloning someone else's idea? Maybe you can, but it's the exception, not the the rule. Now there ARE examples of companies jumping into the existing marketing and cleaning up by doing BETTER (iPhone, Flickr, etc) - but that's not cloning... That's innovating.

huhtenberg 19y ago
For reasoning see my other reply in this thread. Specifically your "few months" estimate is rather conservative. A team of professionals can clone the app or the service in a matter of weeks. The question here rather is how easy to put this cloning team together, i.e. how mainstream the idea is to begin with. Additionally, you appear to be mostly considering high-profile web apps, which is not exactly the whole software universe. Head to the tucows.com, pick virtually any category and you will see it full of apps that are very similar. On the other end of spectrum, have a look at companies like NetScreen, which effectively grew their business by building cheaper Cisco devices. And this is not a singular example, it's more of a general MO rather. All in all, I wrote about what worked for me and what worked exceptionally well. This does not imply that it's the only way.
pchristensen 19y ago
Much more important if you're working part time and your competitors are working full time. The longer they take, the more life you have.

huhtenberg 19y ago

For reasoning see my other reply in this thread. Specifically your "few months" estimate is rather conservative. A team of professionals can clone the app or the service in a matter of weeks. The question here rather is how easy to put this cloning team together, i.e. how mainstream the idea is to begin with. Additionally, you appear to be mostly considering high-profile web apps, which is not exactly the whole software universe. Head to the tucows.com, pick virtually any category and you will see it full of apps that are very similar. On the other end of spectrum, have a look at companies like NetScreen, which effectively grew their business by building cheaper Cisco devices. And this is not a singular example, it's more of a general MO rather. All in all, I wrote about what worked for me and what worked exceptionally well. This does not imply that it's the only way.

pchristensen 19y ago

Much more important if you're working part time and your competitors are working full time. The longer they take, the more life you have.