The Copycats at Hacker News
I have participated kinda heavily on HN and a few other Internet outlets for a few years, and both of my software businesses have been cloned.  BCC has been cloned multiple times, including by one regular user of a forum I spent a lot of time on, who is actually not lacking in savvy.  I do not make a practice of hiding the core tricks as to why BCC works, in fact, I have practically written the complete business plan for cloning it five times and begged people to start using the core tactics.  BCC is, at risk of stating the obvious, not the most technically challenging product.<p>My observations are as follows:<p>1) No clones have caused my business to fail.<p>2) It is <i>effing hard</i> to convince people to rip off good ideas which require non-trivial work or savvy.  Heck, it's highly nontrivial to get them to "rip off" those ideas when they pay five figures to have me write them down in a strategy document or build the prototype myself and hand them the working source code.<p>I mean, take A/B testing.  I have said "A/B testing prints money" so many times that some people are tired of hearing about it.  Empirically, most of my clients, many of whom have read my blog for years, do not A/B test before I work with them.  I talk to a lot of startups, some of whom are highly regarded.  Very few A/B test as a regular thing.  The savviest guy who cloned me doesn't bother A/B testing, either.<p>Please, good HN readers, "steal" that idea from me (or any of the numerous other people you could steal it from, because I certainly stole it myself).  The last company I successfully convinced to actually do it NDAed me vis-a-vis the impact.  Let me hum a few bars: they offered to hire me at a quant's salary to do it full-time.  (Cheapskates.)<p>And yet when we check back on who A/B tests here in February 2013, do you know what we're going to see?  A few articles about it, with wise comments like "A/B testing can only get you to a local maxima" and "Didn't we read an article just like this on Smashing Magazine in 2006?", and fairly few companies who actually have someone do it every week, even among the savvier folks.<p>P.S. Would love to be wrong about that.