Towing Network CEO: Imitation is an angel plagiarism is the Devil

When it comes to plagiarism, people often look down on it, but throughout history, we've found that so many good products and works of art have been born, and the copy behavior has its own positive elements to encourage. In the Internet field, the Copy to Chinese phenomenon of foreign successful product model is very common in China and other Internet market, from QQ, Taobao, school, the United States, to Sina Weibo, micro-letter, and then to the "faithful copy Path" of the Peach Garden private microblogging, they or the overall copy of the original product characteristics, Or on the basis of imitation for reference to carry out their own innovation. As the 28th phase of the geek activity, the drag network CEO Zhao Ye mentioned: Imitation is an angel, plagiarism is the devil. I believe we are all very clear about the outcome.

In the face of the current "replicate as long as the popular" phenomenon, whether all appear to be successful products are suitable for copying it?

Consumer Internet Products: careful copy

In the area of consumer Internet products such as social networking, there is often only room for one giant to live, or a product to occupy the market or to be defeated. So before you copy Pinterest and copy Instagram, think twice, because in this field, the chances of a copycat's survival are very small.

Social networking products are difficult to copy, because, on the one hand, the copy person faces the same scale expansion as the original product, and as a successor, it faces additional problems such as shrinking potential users in the market and restricting profitability.

Assuming you have enough resources, you can make sure that your copy of the social networking product can get a large number of local users in a short time, and your product may look very successful. But in the long run, the likelihood of product failure is still very high. Why?

Social networks are fundamentally international in nature, and if one can communicate with local users on Twitter and communicate with users in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, why should they be constrained by a localized, user-focused microblog? What is likely to happen is that your heavily trained users will be easily converted to their users by Twitter as they become accustomed to using them.

Picplz, Jaiku and other products of the fiasco is the best confirmation of this phenomenon. That's why we see social-networking companies like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and so on, tend not to buy their own direct competitors, but rather to acquire some of the relevant differentiated products-they have done their best in their respective areas. It is unwise for an entrepreneur to compete in the same market according to the rules of the game of the leader.

However, this rule for social products does not necessarily apply to special markets such as China. The domestic Internet environment, which lacks competition from foreign products, gives the copy a chance not to be in other countries, but for the entrepreneur, they still face the domestic big internet giants.

What kind of products can be copied?

Products regulated by regional policies

Stripe is an emerging online payment system whose software allows Web developers to manage their payments over the Internet without having to establish a dedicated commercial bank account or debit card account. Stripe has won 18 million of billions of dollars in funding from Sequoia, hoping the service will expand to its own country.

It can be imagined that payment is an area that relies heavily on the impact of regional policies, and that products like the Strip will face enormous challenges every attempt to enter a new market. This is exactly the type of product that is worth copying, and Alipay's rise at home is the best validation.

Similar to this is the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's Big hot mobile payment products Square, we see domestic Chanfong, Lakara and other similar products have begun to emerge.

Products that require deep localization

Gaobong's fiasco in China proved that a viable copy model, such as Groupon, Opentable and TaskRabbit, requires deep cooperation with local consumers and businesses. such as O2O, such as E-commerce.

E-commerce Products

From product channels, logistics delivery, to customer service, E-commerce is a very localized product type. US e-commerce giant Amazon has struggled for years in China, only after the acquisition of excellence in the situation modest has improved, but its in China and its status in the U.S. electronic retailing is completely different, but when, Jingdong, Taobao Mall and other domestic electric dealers occupy a greater market share. This is also one of the best examples of deep localized products worth copying.

Business-to-business Products

Whether domestic or foreign enterprises, they are often faced with the same problems. When a foreign company comes up with a good solution, for domestic entrepreneurs, they can also offer similar services to domestic companies. At the same time, unlike consumer-grade products like social networks, business-to-business is not a single winner, so this area has greater opportunities for entrepreneurs. such as social service Yammer for internal communication, document sharing service Box.net, Office Collaboration Service huddle, project Management Service Basecamp, etc.

But at present, due to domestic work habits and environmental constraints, this class of enterprise Services has not been given due attention. In this field, a potential product of domestic concern in the near future is similar to GitHub code hosting and version control Services Gitcafe.

Entrepreneurship is a difficult task, and the idea that many product teams and investors want to take advantage of proven success patterns to evade risk is easy to understand. However, it should be noted that in the reference product model, should not blindly copy those successful products, but to consider whether these product models can be copied.