Imitation is the greatest form of flattery

To pretty much no one’s surprise, COVID has been running rampant through a group of people who attended our company trip in Iceland last week. Many others including myself have some sort of a cold but remain negative. I’m now headed to Hawaii to visit my sister and attend my best friend’s wedding and COVID is the talk of the town. After 2+ years in, I’m absolutely sick of it and ready to just treat it like the flu. Canceling events and trapping people in foreign countries doesn’t do any good when everyone has had it.

Anyhow, I saw a long thread from the Co-Founder of ECO yesterday about how there was a company out there that was effectively copying everything they’re doing. He was visibly upset and used his network to put the copycats on blast.

I had a good laugh as I reading through as he did seem to have a case. My stance is that imitation is the greatest form of flattery. If a company is copying what you’re doing, that means you’re doing something right.

I had my first hard lesson on this when I launched a card game on Amazon many years ago. My friends and I were bored and we wanted to launch something on the side for extra income. After a successful Kickstarter and launching on Amazon, we soon had multiple companies copying our game nearly identically. It absolutely drove my 23 year old self nuts.

Of course, this was just the start of it. After initial success at Secfi, we started to see competitors popping up left and right. We had one that copied our entire website but changed the blue to red. A cease and desist followed shortly after that.

For better or worse, this is part of business and you have to accept that success will bring in the copycats. You just have to block out the noise and focus on continuing to innovate.