Value and technical difficulty have no interdependence. The fact that this thing could be cloned in half a day doesn't in any way indicate that the original bu

Value and technical difficulty have no interdependence. The fact that this thing could be cloned in half a day doesn't in any way indicate that the original business won't go on to be successful. I know this because I make a comfortable living on the proceeds of a SaaS product that anybody here could reproduce in half a day. The fact that several dozen of my customers are HN readers (and thus capable of the aforementioned feat) goes to show that even if it's possible to do something, the smart business decision is sometimes to pay somebody else to do it for you. I actually give a full set of instructions to build your own version of the service on the site, and link to several open source packages that you can install on your server. But still there are plenty of people out there capable of multiplying [hourly bill rate] * 4 to come up with how much doing that would cost. Since that'll buy most shops a couple years of my service, the smart money goes toward the "buy" end of that build vs. buy decision.