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Should you copy a competitor?
Here’s when it works (and when it doesn’t)
Thank you to Erin Weigel (Author and Senior Design Manager @ Deliveroo), Angèle Lenglemetz (Product @ Cleo), Daphne Tideman (Author and D2C Growth Consultant), Joseph Fitzgibbon (Founder @ Growth & Company, former Head of Growth @ Graze and ClickMechanic), and Octave Auger (VP Marketing @ Faria Education Group) for contributing to this 🙏
I hear this all the time from founders:
- “Let’s not re-invent the wheel”
- “What do the best in class do?”
- “It works for them, it’ll work for us. Right?”
Not necessarily.
In reality, 9 out of 10 direct copycats I’ve seen flop.
At best, you can cut some corners and get inspiration. At worst, you distract your team, slow momentum and build tech debt.
Too often, teams chase the latest feature or trend without understanding why it works—or if it even does.
We’re often drawing unrealistic comparisons to more mature companies, or we’re copying failing features ☠️ ☠️ ☠️
Slack’s former Head of Growth, Merci Grace once shared in an interview that she saw people copying Slack’s worst onboarding features:
In the 2015 onboarding experience, we had these little circles that would animate…it was too light and there were too many of them. It was hilarious and also kind of sad to watch people trying to replicate things that weren’t working for us — as they had no insight into that.
This isn’t just a startup problem. Even big companies see this happen with costlier consequences (in the millions and billions for the likes of big tech).
