

Ask HN: To clone or not to clone a startup? - ashwin_kumar

Is it a good idea to clone startup idea in local markets?
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onion2k
For a start, you can't clone a startup idea. The idea is the founder's vision.
You don't know what that is. All you know about is the product that they've
put on there. You don't know where they're going, what they're planning, or
how well actually they're doing. So, to that end, you can't clone the idea,
just the product as it stands today.

Secondly, markets are different. What works in one won't necessarily work in
another. The founder of Dinnr did great write up about their demise having
'copied' a Scandinavian idea believing it'd work in the UK[1]. You still need
to make it work for your market. So a _clone_ won't work.

I don't see anything at all wrong with taking a broadly similar idea to an
existing business and building a new startup based on it, with your own vision
and making it work for another market. The idea is generally the easy bit.
Executing is where things get hard.

[1] [https://medium.com/@michalbohanes/seven-lessons-i-learned-
fr...](https://medium.com/@michalbohanes/seven-lessons-i-learned-from-the-
failure-of-my-first-startup-dinnr-c166d1cfb8b8)

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lolrbawhat
What does "in local markets" even mean?

