Why Just Copying Someone Doesn't Work
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
About once a month I get a Google alert notifying me that someone is looking for a Web developer who can copy the functionality of my Web site.
The thinking goes that if they simply copy the Web site verbatim, they’ll essentially enjoy the same success. This sounds good in theory except for one truth - in five years across three different companies (Swapalease.com, Go BIG Network, and GotCast.com) no one has ever done it successfully.
That doesn’t mean people haven’t tried. Heck, people have gone as far as to literally copy our Web sites and just change a few of the colors and buttons. Yet time and time again, they fail.
The reason these companies fail isn’t because they didn’t make a good enough copy. It’s because they mistook copying the product for copying the business. As a business owner it’s important to understand the difference between what your competition can replicate and what they cannot.
You Can’t Copy Execution
Making a clone of a product is the easy part. The hard part is executing properly on a business in order for it to grow. In the case of our duplicate competitors, they usually die on the vine in a matter of months. They don’t seem to realize that even if you were to copy our product verbatim, using an identical logo and domain name, that the actual daily management and execution is what separates one company from another.
What we do day in and day out – marketing, branding, product development and customer service – is what drives the company toward success.
If your plan is to copy someone’s formula and use it for yourself, you had better have a much better plan for execution than they do. When Overture (now a part of Yahoo!) invented the model of putting paid text ads next to the results in your Web searches, Google flat-out stole the concept.
In Google’s case, however, they executed far better than Overture did on the very concept they stole. In this case, they were able to win not because they stole the concept, but because they executed on the concept better than Overture.
People Buy more than just Products
You’ll often find that copying the product alone, even if it’s an identical twin, isn’t enough. When people buy a product they are not just buying the item itself. They are buying the entire package it comes with.
In the case of a product like a Nike sneaker, they are buying the brand of Nike, not just the sneaker. You can build an identical pair of sneakers, charge half the price for them, and Nike will still outsell you. The product is only a fraction of the purchase. People are also buying the authenticity of the brand that they feel strongly about.
In other cases people are paying for efficacy. You may be able to copy the barebones format of the craigslist.org Web site, but you don’t have the traffic or the efficacy that craigslist does. You also don’t have millions of users who have successfully posted ads on craigslist and gotten what they wanted. That kind of activity requires an incredible amount of time and success to replicate, which copying a product verbatim doesn’t allow for.
Good Ideas will always be Copied
On the flip side, if you have a good idea you can pretty much guarantee someone will copy it. But your concern shouldn’t be whether or not you will be copied, it should be whether or not the person copying you is better at delivering your product than you are.
You can try to protect your idea with all of the patents, trademarks and copyrights you want, but at the end of the day if you’re not out-executing your competition, you’re going to get beat. Even patents will eventually expire!
Bad Competition is a Favor
To some degree you can think of bad competition as a favor. The more poor attempts your competitors make at copying your product, the better your original product looks by comparison.
Additionally, lots of bad competition makes the marketplace look artificially saturated to other would-be competitors. If someone performs a search for your product and sees ten other companies are offering the same thing, they may think twice about becoming the 11th. Little do they know that most of those companies are just cannon fodder in the war for customers!
What really matters is the competitor that enters the space fully loaded with the right management and experience to take you on. While having a good, original product is a great first step, it really is the people behind the product that make all the difference.