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independence2 unconnected
standing

contested · 1 claims against 1

applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

outcome not stated

confidence

high

evidence

2 claims · 2 articles · 2 receipts

window

2020-06-16 → 2024-12-05

2 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Copy the best idea in your category, then improve it

Take a competitor's strongest move rather than inventing from scratch, but ship it with an addition of your own, because a straight lift produces a mediocre version of someone else's product. The cost of the same behaviour at scale is visible in categories where a rush of hasty imitators degraded buyers' ability to tell anything apart.

Where this splits

One member endorses aggressively copying competitors provided you add something, while the other documents a wave of copies tainting the category for everyone in it.

1 claims against 1

Preetam Nath

Copy the strongest competitor idea and add an improvement

  1. 01Copy your competitors' strongest ideas without hesitation, but only after adding an improvement of your own; lifting them unchanged produces mediocre results.
the objection · 1 claimCory Zue

Copying at scale taints the category for everyone

A wave of hastily built imitators using aggressive marketing damages buyers' ability to choose and taints the whole category, including your reputable product.

What it returned

  • The author extends Suhail Doshi's argument for aggressively copying competitors by insisting the copy has to be improved on.

  • Zue attributes the boilerplate gold rush to Marc Lou's success in the JavaScript world, says a new competitor appears almost daily, and says it makes him feel like a grifter for selling a product he spent five years on.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in positioning

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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