For a start, you can&#x27;t clone a startup idea. The idea is the founder&#x27;s vision. You don&#x27;t know what that is. All you know about is the product that they&#x27;ve put on there. You don&#x27;t know where they&#x27;re going, what they&#x27;re planning, or how well actually they&#x27;re doing. So, to that end, you can&#x27;t clone the idea, just the product as it stands today.<p>Secondly, markets are different. What works in one won&#x27;t necessarily work in another. The founder of Dinnr did great write up about their demise having &#x27;copied&#x27; a Scandinavian idea believing it&#x27;d work in the UK[1]. You still need to make it work for your market. So a <i>clone</i> won&#x27;t work.<p>I don&#x27;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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@michalbohanes&#x2F;seven-lessons-i-learned-from-the-failure-of-my-first-startup-dinnr-c166d1cfb8b8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@michalbohanes&#x2F;seven-lessons-i-learned-fr...</a>