As a business, making and selling tshirts is no great innovation, I agree. But when the web application is a painstakingly detailed clone of another company's,

As a business, making and selling tshirts is no great innovation, I agree. But when the web application is a painstakingly detailed clone of another company's, I think that the virtue of "completely bootstrapping it" to be undermined, and reduced to little more than a "me too" business. I think that if someone started up a company called MacRonald's, specialized in selling cheap hamburgers, and had a clown mascot who wore a funny tophat, it wouldn't be praised much. Even if the founder was a 19-year-old.