Ask HN: Do you worry about copycats when building a project?
&gt; I know people keep saying you might build the wrong project so you should release early. But what if I&#x27;m building the right project?<p>The odds that someone else iterates on your idea aren’t zero, but they’re very close to zero. In practice, usually nobody else cares about your new thing enough to use it, let alone copy or improve upon it.<p>OTOH, the odds that you need to iterate a few times before you have something that people want are greater than 50%.<p>So, you don’t need to convince yourself that a competitive product isn’t a risk, nor that you’ll be able to handle a competitor if one emerges. Merely accept that the risk of making something that doesn’t serve a market is way higher - probably by 10x or more. Going from 50% chance of making something useless to 25% - by seeing how users react to your product - is worth increasing the chances of a copycat from, say, 1% to 2% (or even from 2% to 10%, though I don’t think 10% is likely).