People are often copying the wrong ideas. Why copy a reading list site or make yet-another-alternative-HN-view site, when you could start a real business?
I find Patrick's posts and comments invaluable. He's made a real business selling bingo cards to teachers. He pays contractors and venders thousands of dollars per year.
He has this way of writing that makes what he does sound easy: "a SQL query here, A/B test there, and whoopsie, I just made $35K."
I set out to copy BCC. I asked my wife, "Is there a software product you wish existed, but doesn't?" She wanted a site where she can make custom cupcake wrappers. So I set about making it. It's been nearly a year, and we're only now over $200/month in revenue and +150 unique users per day. It's been a lot of hard work, but along the way, interacting with customers, I realized there's an opportunity to build a real business. We're about to buy a cutting machine and custom dies so we can move from just selling PDFs to fulfilling physical orders. Who knows, with all the emails I've collected, we may start a selling custom web hosting for bakers and party planners.
So, I just want to say: by all means copy something. Clone someone's successful website if you must, but copy their hard work. Copy their market validation. Build a real business.
Simple fact: there are orders of magnitude more people in the world struggling to use the most basic functions of Microsoft Word than there are people who can write Hello World. Anything which makes tasks easier for people in group A is valuable, even if it's already trivial for people in group B.
I find Patrick's posts and comments invaluable. He's made a real business selling bingo cards to teachers. He pays contractors and venders thousands of dollars per year.
He has this way of writing that makes what he does sound easy: "a SQL query here, A/B test there, and whoopsie, I just made $35K."
I set out to copy BCC. I asked my wife, "Is there a software product you wish existed, but doesn't?" She wanted a site where she can make custom cupcake wrappers. So I set about making it. It's been nearly a year, and we're only now over $200/month in revenue and +150 unique users per day. It's been a lot of hard work, but along the way, interacting with customers, I realized there's an opportunity to build a real business. We're about to buy a cutting machine and custom dies so we can move from just selling PDFs to fulfilling physical orders. Who knows, with all the emails I've collected, we may start a selling custom web hosting for bakers and party planners.
So, I just want to say: by all means copy something. Clone someone's successful website if you must, but copy their hard work. Copy their market validation. Build a real business.