What's the point in creating a startup when anyone can copy it in days?

My experience is that people cannot copy original ideas for two reasons:

1. People generally fear originality until it receives sufficient social validation, but by then your business is established.

2. People generally cannot copy anything original after a certain point of complexity without motivation well into unnatural territory. For example nobody is going to quit their jobs to replicate your unproven idea because the effort is too high for something completely unused.

A rare exception to those two points is Minecraft. They replicated the idea of a sci-fi voxel game from scratch, changed the scenery, and kept in beta for years.

[delayed]

Distribution is a whole other animal.

You can copy a product, but you can't make people pay for it as easily

People tried creating alternatives for MS Office, over the decades. Didn't succeed. Not because of technical moat. Some companies like Google reworked internet serach problem. They succeeded because of technical moat (page-ranking) and later they quickly moved on to the more common moat - user base, supply chain hijacking (ads) and branding. Social media firms hardly have any technical moat. They 100% rely on locking of user base.

Technical work let's you enter the field, but the survival depends on the squatting in the supply chain routes or locking away your customers in your dungeons.

I think that that's the wrong way to go about creating economic entities and services and products. The aim should be to create something genuinely useful rather than a quick way to make money, an entity that then gets sold (I find this ridiculous), or a method to monopolise or "discover" something in order to generate profit.

People and other businesses buy services and products for a myriad of reasons; sure, cost and convenience will weigh significantly more than others, but the decision-making is never down to the idea or cost alone. In fact, after cost and convenience, trust plays a very important role; and this is translated in a number of ways, from the ability of an entity to deliver on its promises, to safety and security (where applicable), potential for growth alongside the buyer's needs, penchant and budget allocation for innovation, how it treats its workers or behaves in other respects (brand value stuff: environment, stakeholder engagement etc.), easiness of collaboration and communication, the quality of support, whether they're willing to risk losing some money in the short run for the sake of long run success (i.e. being ready to reimburse some costs for a client beyond what's legally required when it fucked up), whether the provider speaks the same language, whether it's based in a jurisdiction where the buyer can trust that the seller is not green- or white-washing on its commitments, and so, so many other factors.

It's not uniqueness of the service or product that drives success or keeps a business afloat, but a combination of factors.

Assuming your premise is meaningful, which is a stretch, if you find yourself in an age where you expect anything you dream up to be replicated, then isn't your onus to dream up the world as you want it to be? Are you wary of such power, or is your premise false?

Successful products are usually built from inside the system, not from outside - and then it doesn't matter if 50 people from the outside copied it, they won't get paid because they aren't the right people to begin with.

Now problem is, because people from outside usually don't know it, and believe they are relevant, they used to create the vast majority of "investment" demand for coding... and now because they ask themselves the same question as you did, they just stopped trying, and their demand is gone.

Copying a product is easy.But copying timing,insight,execution speed,and user understanding is what actually matters, and that's what more people miss.

I don’t think anyone that has worked in an early stage startup would ask this question.

Because the reality is that 99% of a startup’s success is in the boring grind of doing marketing, sales, development, customer support, accounting, on and on.

Actually making the simple app is the easiest part of the process, and always has been, even before AI.