The traditional philosophy of the first-mover advantage is dead in today’s startup ecosystem. We are nowadays in the age of open information – sources such as LinkedIn or GitHub make everything open and transparent.
Combined with an abundance of venture capital and that the cost of building software is gradually trending to zero, it is no wonder that new ideas coming out of startups are being copied quicker than ever. In some cases, it takes mere weeks.
Made infamous by Rocket Internet, which copied anything from Airbnb to Amazon to eBay – the “copycat” effect is not new, but it used to be limited to the “simpler” models such as ecommerce. Nowadays, even the more technical models are not insulated….
