Ask HN: What's the point in creating a startup when anyone can copy it in days?

throwawaysleep

Distribution is a whole other animal.

austin-cheney

My experience is that people cannot copy original ideas for two reasons: 1. People generally fear originality until it receives sufficient social validation, but by then your business is established. 2. People generally cannot copy anything original after a certain point of complexity without motivation well into unnatural territory. For example nobody is going to quit their jobs to replicate your unproven idea because the effort is too high for something completely unused. A rare exception to those two points is Minecraft. They replicated the idea of a sci-fi voxel game from scratch, changed the scenery, and kept in beta for years.

nness

"First-mover advantage" — its not a guarantee of success. But its more of a guarantee than the guy trying to vibe-code a copy.

anovikov

Successful products are usually built from inside the system, not from outside - and then it doesn't matter if 50 people from the outside copied it, they won't get paid because they aren't the right people to begin with. Now problem is, because people from outside usually don't know it, and believe they are relevant, they used to create the vast majority of "investment" demand for coding... and now because they ask themselves the same question as you did, they just stopped trying, and their demand is gone.

zkmon

People tried creating alternatives for MS Office, over the decades. Didn't succeed. Not because of technical moat. Some companies like Google reworked internet serach problem. They succeeded because of technical moat (page-ranking) and later they quickly moved on to the more common moat - user base, supply chain hijacking (ads) and branding. Social media firms hardly have any technical moat. They 100% rely on locking of user base. Technical work let's you enter the field, but the survival depends on the squatting in the supply chain routes or locking away your customers in your dungeons.

robtherobber

I think that that's the wrong way to go about creating economic entities and services and products. The aim should be to create something genuinely useful rather than a quick way to make money, an entity that then gets sold (I find this ridiculous), or a method to monopolise or "discover" something in order to generate profit. People and other businesses buy services and products for a myriad of reasons; sure, cost and convenience will weigh significantly more than others, but the decision-making is never down to the idea or cost alone. In fact, after cost and convenience, trust plays a very important role; and this is translated in a number of ways, from the ability of an entity to deliver on its promises, to safety and security (where applicable), potential for growth alongside the buyer's needs, penchant and budget allocation for innovation, how it treats its workers or behaves in other respects (brand value stuff: environment, stakeholder engagement etc.), easiness of collaboration and communication, the quality of support, whether they're willing to risk losing some money in the short run for the sake of long run success (i.e. being ready to reimburse some costs for a client beyond what's legally required when it fucked up), whether the provider speaks the same language, whether it's based in a jurisdiction where the buyer can trust that the seller is not green- or white-washing on its commitments, and so, so many other factors. It's not uniqueness of the service or product that drives success or keeps a business afloat, but a combination of factors.

_wire_

Assuming your premise is meaningful, which is a stretch, if you find yourself in an age where you expect anything you dream up to be replicated, then isn't your onus to dream up the world as you want it to be? Are you wary of such power, or is your premise false?

soulchild37

You can copy a product, but you can't make people pay for it as easily

keiferski

I don’t think anyone that has worked in an early stage startup would ask this question. Because the reality is that 99% of a startup’s success is in the boring grind of doing marketing, sales, development, customer support, accounting, on and on. Actually making the simple app is the easiest part of the process, and always has been, even before AI.

late_night_fix

Copying a product is easy.But copying timing,insight,execution speed,and user understanding is what actually matters, and that's what more people miss.

K0IN

Even if someone is copying it Support and maintainance, security aren't solved with vibecoding.

bdr7r6

Thats the point. Its all about how much risk you are willing to take. Thats what startups are supposed to represent - the risk takers of the population for whom the story has a high likelihood it wont end happily ever after. Check out the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff which tells us what the Carrying Capicity of a group for risk takers is. Its never been high. Maybe 5% of any population. Out of which 4.99% fail. With those odds populations cant have everyone taking risk. Such populations sooner or later go extinct. Attention Economy/Social Media/News Media realized risk taking captures attention. It helps Elon to raise funds, mesmerize customers and employee etc before anything is even built. So everyone starts signalling they are risk takers when really its about something else.

sminchev

This is called concurrency and it drives the world forward. Why do we have so many producers and sellers of clothes. If we had only one clothes manifaturer in the world, who will trigger the innovation and progress forward?! Nobody can steal your identity, attitude, communication with clients and support. And usually, this is what makes the difference. And there are also other, legal ways to protect things, even though it is expensive. It is to patent your products and ideas. :)

aristofun

Extremely ignorant point of view. Author obviously never launched anything beyond a hellow world

mindcrime

The important parts of your business cannot, in fact, be "copied in days". Things like trust, based on demonstrated reliability over time, human relationships based on being a decent human being and treating your customers with respect, your willingness to bend over backwards to accomodate special requests from customers, your ability to embed yourself into your customers' environment and build a genuinely deep understanding of their problems and challenges... etc., etc. Copying technology is easy. But "business ≠ technology".

1attice

Back a step. You presuppose the possibility of a point, but is there still such a possibility? This seems like a weird, almost metaphysical question, but I've been coming back to it a lot lately. Is the goal financial independence? If so, there are much more efficient, risk-off ways of getting that. (For example, a nursing degree, or a red seal in plumbing.) You are choosing to work in grindhouse conditions with no union or safety net, where ageism or just burnout will eventually make you unhireable. There is only so much 996 in a person, and the winners take all. Most of the easy wins are behind us. Ok then, maybe it isn't for the money, then. So is it to usher in the future? Be the hand that twists the dial? But in that case, what compels you to believe that you've identified a worthwhile future to blithely endorse? The laws of unexpected consequences are binding, and the judgments are severe. Is it for the love of the activity, then? The making? Well, that part's been automated this past year or three, so at best you will be a restaurant critic, not a chef. I'm not sure the magic is still vital.

HeritageLab

What is easy to copy is usually the final crystallization. What is hard to copy is the architecture that kept choosing that crystallization over all the others. copyable artifact ≠ copyable architecture That is why “they can clone it in days” is often true at the product layer and still incomplete at the company layer. They cloned the surface, not the engine.

cyanydeez

Not anyone has VC funded friends to write the checks.

vdalhambra

For developer tools specifically: distribution. Building the tool is the easy part now. The hard part is the months of showing up — being in the right directories, answering questions on the right forums, maintaining docs, responding to issues at 2am. That compounds into trust, and trust doesn't copy in days. I've been building open-source MCP servers for Claude. The technical work took weeks. Getting into 8+ directories, building a community track record, being mentioned in the right places — that part took much longer and a copier would have to start from zero on all of it. By then you're on v2.