Ask HN: To clone or not to clone a startup?

For a start, you can't clone a startup idea. The idea is the founder's vision. You don't know what that is. All you know about is the product that they've put on there. You don't know where they're going, what they're planning, or how well actually they're doing. So, to that end, you can't clone the idea, just the product as it stands today.

Secondly, markets are different. What works in one won't necessarily work in another. The founder of Dinnr did great write up about their demise having 'copied' a Scandinavian idea believing it'd work in the UK[1]. You still need to make it work for your market. So a clone won't work.

I don't see anything at all wrong with taking a broadly similar idea to an existing business and building a new startup based on it, with your own vision and making it work for another market. The idea is generally the easy bit. Executing is where things get hard.

[1] https://medium.com/@michalbohanes/seven-lessons-i-learned-fr...

What does "in local markets" even mean?