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Comment by blakes | Hacker News Reader

Because transparency is good.

Also competition is good, stop being afraid of competition or people "stealing" ideas.

Exactly. An idea is just that, an idea. It takes months and years of hard work to turn an idea into an income stream.

Most of the businesses in the list are very easy to copy. There are neither rocket science, neither patents to protect them, neither big money to pay lawyers to protect their work.

Knowing how well the product sells, you can copy it piece-by-piece by saving a lot of time trying different approaches. Author of original product already did all the hard work guessing what will work the best. You just come, copy and profit from his work.

This is not true. People who copy will mostly do it for money. Finally the passion for the idea trumps the desire to chase money and your product will eventually suck. On the other hand if you think you can make a better product from existing solution, then there is a good chance of you succeeding.

You can try copying any one of those of ideas for money and see for yourself.

>Finally the passion for the idea trumps the desire to chase money and your product will eventually suck.

I think his point is that the ideas being shared are simple enough not to require that much passion to implement, and the goal being not doing something better, but something economically viable (good enough to generate income).

The obvious counter-question would be: why would people use the worse copy instead of just using the superior original? The answer is that it could be the case for a variety of reasons, one of which is cultural relevance, the original filters geographically, is not internationalized well, people do it differently in different regions, etc. After all, you find companies doing similar things in the same market, it only makes sense there's chance of finding other companies doing the same in different markets (given the conditions to implement the idea are already in place: not that easy pulling an Uber/Lyft in a country where mobile broadband and payment haven't matured).

Will do:)

You're not entirely wrong, but building most products is easier than finding the right audience and being able to sell it to them. That's the business.

But by the time finishing the copy, the owner had improved their product and advanced the roadmap. The key here is constant move, IMO.

From my experience copying a feature is about twice cheaper than trying different approaches. You may not figure out a good way to implement it until you build first version and let people try it. You may need re-iterate to find perfect implementation. The copy-cat will come later to see what you've done and will implement the good solution without iterations.

The copy-cat may have more developers too.

Just curious. Why aren't you copying these and ranking in all that money then?

I don't think this is so simple with one person shops, as knowing one's value propositions, revenue/profit numbers & acquisition channels etc goes vastly beyond the concept of the presumably worthless 'idea' that people usually refer to in this context.

Good for customers but not for business. Competition tends to minimize margins and profits. While main business goal is to make money, competition is against business goals.

Ideas are cheap, execution is everything.

Competition can also grow a sector, bringing in many new customers that may have otherwise dismissed an idea or might not have even heard of the idea without the exposure driven by the competition.

If a big chunk of the public moves from "should I buy an electric car?" to "which electric car should I buy?", then all electric car producers win.

This is kind of why I think Tesla wants someone like FF to survive.

Many one-person businesses focus on niches and do one thing great. Often they also offer great (aka personal) support. Also, quite often, they are great in building a community around their service. Additionally, many of the solo entrepreneurs are good teachers and share what they know. All these factors together make their services (and themselves) so valuable that a competitor with a slightly better price will not take away all customers.

You're talking about acquisition channels. Community, blog or webinars are great channels, but there are also organic search, paid search, traditional advertising, native advertising, bundling, paid promotions, upselling. If the copy-cat is better at these, their product will out-sell yours.

Very few of the one-person businesses go for mass markets where you need the paid (ad) channels that you mention. Also, the "channels" I mentioned are not just for acquisition but for enduring relationships. You cannot simply buy trust, an ad will not deliver as much value as a connected and caring business owner.

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