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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't worry. Startups are rarely killed by competitors. And people who copy you don't get as much benefit from it as you might expect. They know what you're doing but not why.

Worry about making users happy. Competitors are a second order problem.

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I agree in principle, having been through the process with a huge company looking at us, walking away and then launching a competitor site soon afterwards. They out-executed us due to a number of factors, in particular as they already had scale.

A request to abide by the NDA is about all you can do, and in our case it wasn't really ever going to make a difference.

I also believe the same, as we really know what we are doing better than them as it's been our total focus while this is a new project for them. We know they'll take market share but we are confident that we'll retain our user-base and hopefully over time we'll be able to share the space that their behemoth marketing team will generate through awareness.

Thank you for replying, I'm honored that you've read my note and taken the time.

>>They know what you're doing but not why

I am having trouble understanding this. Isn't "why" trivial, if not obvious? I think "what" and "how" are far more important than "why".

For example, most of the other YC-like organizations copied the questions on our application form. We ask those questions to detect things we've found are either good or bad in startups. But since the people who copied us don't know what the questions are designed to detect, they can't learn as much from the answers as we could.

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