This is something the entrepreneurs on here should be taking more seriously. My latest adventure in startup land has been going well. As this is my first real

This is something the entrepreneurs on here should be taking more seriously. My latest adventure in startup land has been going well. As this is my first real taste of "success" and because I, like many of you, feel a sense of obligation to share with my community how I stumbled upon something that works I have been somewhat loose-lipped about my methods and my progress. When things started to really pick up I decided to post on the Twitter account how many total sales had been completed. I thought it would help attract more sellers (and it probably did) but it also got the copy-cats interested. (Though I display the number of sales on the site, so if you go and add everything up you can figure all this out anyway.) I recently found out about my first direct competitor, who it seems is knocking off other people's creations to sell and clearly got some "inspiration" (i.e., ripped me off) on how I do things on my end. Right down to copying HTML from my site. Needless to say it is discouraging, but it also forces you to hunker down to try and stay ahead of the competition. I strongly urge others who are in a similar position to reconsider just how open they are. Especially with the people who will email you privately and ask for guidance in what they will usually tell you is something that in no way competes with what you're doing. There are indeed many sharks in the water. I do think there's something to the whole 'brag about your success and more people will find out about you' thing. In some cases this probably does turn out to be better for the business if it attracts a much larger audience. It is a fine line though and should be walked carefully.