Should you clone or copy an existing startup?
When to take a peek at competitor features, and when it's hurting your chances of success
A question I see on Hacker News and IndieHackers from time to time is “Should we clone ___ startup? They seem to be successful” or “Can I get rich by cloning a successful startup?”

In almost all cases, the answer is no.
You might see the simplicity of what works and underestimate the amount of effort that it took to get there.
In most cases, successfully executing one idea came after successfully executing 10 other variations of this idea.
Very rarely do founding teams come up with the “correct” version of their idea early on. And very rarely do teams understand why a product works, without first understanding the customer who uses that product.
Businesses take years of meandering work to become successful.
People who copy other people's startups are taking a shortcut.
It sucks because they skipped a bunch of mistakes and learning the original founders worked hard to earn.
What should we do instead?
There is literally only one path to success as a product designer or a product team. Focus on the problem, and the customers experiencing that problem, to come up with the best solution for your users to the problem they’re experiencing.
You can glean a little bit of those details from examining competitor products. But not much.
It’s low-fidelity, and it’s full of distractions.
You’ll waste time building features your users don’t actually want, or need. You’ll get those features wrong because you don’t actually understand how they’re used.
You’ll miss the 80/20 opportunities to build 80% of the value proposition with 20% of the effort.
And you’ll miss the “New, upcoming feature” the competing team just realized is the only feature that matters.
Did we ever copy features from our competitors?
The short answer is no. I’ve actually never signed up for an account with any of our competitors to take a look at what works for them, and what doesn’t.
Let your customers filter this information for you. If it’s important enough for customers to ask for it (even once), it’s important enough for you to explore as a brand new feature for your product.
Ask your customers a few simple questions like: “What problem does this feature solve” and “why do you need feature ___?”
Why we don’t look at our competitors products?
The biggest reason is that I’m afraid I’ll copy things that seem like good ideas to me. After all, they seemed like a good idea to a brilliant product team working on a competing product, that knows basically what I know about our customers. If they’re wrong, I’m unlikely to understand why.
The second reason is that I worked for a startup, whose founders were completely paralyzed by a competitor who copied their startup idea. They were so angry that some startup in California blatantly stole their precious idea, that they stopped focusing on their customers, and wasted all of their attention chasing a venture-backed startup 800 miles away.
It wasn’t until at least 2 years later, when they re-focused on their customers, that they started building products and features their users actually wanted.
How is it that we have some of the same features as our competitors if we didn’t copy their product?
From time to time, a steady stream of customers will email you feature requests for your product, and blatantly tell you “Competitor X has this tiny feature, and other people on our team wanted to know if you have it / want to know if you can build it / will only buy your product if you build it”.

It would be a mistake is to blindly copy that feature. But it would also be a mistake to ignore it.
Ask your customers enough to understand the problem the feature solves, and why they want the feature.
Also, beware there are features you need to build, that your customers don’t actually want or need. They complicate the product, and make it harder to use. But you might need to build them anyway.
These features are called Sales-Enablement features. They’re dumb things your customers never use, but can be easily convinced they need by a competing sales team. Or they’re things that make your product seem “Super useful and cool” when your champion tells the rest of their company about your product (even if no one ever uses these features).
Eat the cost. Build these features. Advertise them alongside your more-important features.
Tips for founders being copied:
Fortunately, the “copy what works” strategy isn't usually enough to make a startup successful.
There's no shortcut for putting in the work, and if you follow your users another year, you'll be pretty far ahead of anyone who copies what you know now.
These types think they're going to make some easy money, and when it isn't so easy, they quit.
But, shoulda coulda woulda— Honestly if you ignore it, it'll probably go away, and probably isn't worth your time.
Keep working on your product. Beat them by making it better, in ways that they can’t copy.
Best of luck!