COPYING COPE

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

Competitors used to wait until your product was obviously winning before they copied it. SuperMe's CEO watched rivals copy Grubhub and Pinterest years ago and says four venture-backed startups copied SuperMe in recent months, down to its navigation and custom icons. Copying is now cheap enough that rivals imitate a product before they know whether it's worth copying, so the CEO puts more weight on distribution and networks that keep growing once the products look alike. Grub Canada once copied Grubhub's HTML outright but couldn't copy the restaurant network behind the site.