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:

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).

In my experience, copying can be helpful to reduce decision paralysis and the existential question of ‘what next’?

However what people miss is seeing it as one part of the puzzle.

One part of the hierarchy of evidence.

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How important is competitor analysis?

In her book Design for Impact, Erin Weigel, Senior Design Manager at Deliveroo, talks about the Hierarchy of Evidence for product teams: a way to rank research findings based on the rigour of the methods.

Top to bottom we have:

1. A systematic, macro review of experiments over time (most reliable but hard to find)
2. Randomised controlled experiments (i.e. A/B tests)
3. Observational studies (i.e. user research, specifically when we watch users interact with products in natural settings)
4. Expert opinion (i.e. ‘best practice’ or what’s covered in thought leadership literature)

This diagram (which I love) originates from evidence-based medicine and was later translated to product.

In UX, customer insights are positioned above competitive analysis or industry trends because they provide direct, primary data about your users (i.e. you saw it happen first-hand ✋🏻). Whereas expert opinions and trends are often generalised and may not be relevant to your business context (they’re second-hand ✋🏻✋🏻).

This mirrors the medical model, where direct empirical evidence ranks higher than anecdotal evidence.

Competitor analysis sits in the fourth and lowest section.

Although, I’d argue that it ranks lower given that we don’t know what’s working in a product from the outside.

That’s not to discount it entirely.

Oh no.

The best decision making happens when you have a range of sources and options to choose from.

Competitor analysis gets the creative juices flowing, brings the inner nerd out and helps us see what’s possible on other horizons.

Even better, great ideas come from a range of sources and a range of minds.

It’s generally safe to use competitor analysis when you view it this way: as one piece of the puzzle.

However that’s not how I see it used.

I see companies directly copying features without adding the extra ingredients (customer insights, analytics).

Does this ever work?

Well dear reader, it depends.

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When copying a competitor make sense

A lot needs to be in place for you to directly copy a competitor and succeed, like:

• A strong overlap between your audiences
• Being at a similar same stage as the competitor you’re looking at
• A solid understanding of the target audience’s problems
• Positive signals that the feature you’re looking at is resonating
• Positive signals that the competitor you’re looking at is growing
• An understanding of the risk-reward: i.e. how big the thing is you want to build and how much tech debt it will create

However, it’s hard to have all these things in place at once.

Instead, to make this a bit more concrete here are three scenarios when copying a competitor is generally a safe (and even good) idea:

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Scenario 1: when you have no baseline

✅ Great for: Early-stage startups without an existing structure.
💡 Example: Copying a basic pricing page just to get something live.

When there’s no metric to improve on, your first priority is to build the baseline metric. For that, quick time to live is important (so you can test ASAP).

Tools like Mobbin, ReallyGoodEmails and Mailcharts can be great to help you see a range of examples quickly.

What’s important here, is managing expectations that you’ll need to iterate once it’s live; that the first version isn’t going to blow the roof off the business overnight…

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Scenario 2: when the build time is short

✅ Great for: sprints with lots of small tests or small features
💡 Example: A/B testing an emails, paywalls, ad creative, single screens

For anything that takes a few days to create or build, it’s fine to blindly copy a competitor.

Why?

The risks are low. The potential tech debt is low.

For instance, here’s personal copycats flops of mine — one big and one small.

• Blinkist’s Honest Paywall: I’ve tried this a few times, and each time it showed nothing near the 23% increase in trial opt in the original test saw. Two times I tried this there was no statistical difference at all. Does it matter? No, we went on to test 15 more things instead.
• Discord-style community: I worked at a product that had a Facebook-style community (a homepage with posts, comments, groups and chats accessible from the bottom navigation). We tried a side-navigation (like Slack and Discord) aimed to help people discover content and engage in smaller networks. After rolling out to a small subset and no result, it was canned. But it was a big feature that took over 6mo from start to finish.

The thing to ask is: how long will this take us? If it’s less than three days of an operator’s time (engineer, marketer etc) then it’s a no brainer to copy something else.

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Scenario 3: When you need the feature to be competitive

✅ Great when: If customers expect the feature/thing as a standard
💡 Example: CRMs needing standard integrations.

​Joseph Fitzgibbon, Founder of Growth & Company and former Head of Growth @ Graze and ClickMechanic says:

Table stakes describes when a feature is highly valued but not unique. In other words:

Examples of table stakes features often include (rightly or wrongly):

• Collaboration tools (e.g. Google Docs, Notion, Slack) → real-time editing & commenting
• CRM software (e.g. Salesforce, HubSpot) → contact management, email integration, reporting dashboards
• Project management tools (e.g. Asana, Monday.com, Trello) → task creation, due dates, assignees, Kanban boards
• Social media apps (like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok) → chat features, commenting, liking, sharing

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Without table stakes features, there is a risk of being left behind. According to Octave Auger, VP Marketing @ Faria Education Group:

If you’re finding it hard to decide whether something is a table stakes feature, go back to customers and use this handy matrix to help weed through the options:

Say you've decided to copy something - it's often not as simple as it sounds. There still needs to be a lot of product and craft that goes into the final thing.

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When copying don’t forget two crucial things

a) Quality matters, not just speed

​Angèle Lenglemetz, Product Lead @ Cleo shares:

b) Tailor to your brand and tone of voice

​Author and Growth Consultant, Daphne Tideman shares:

So make sure you do the feature / ad /variant justice to really give it a shot, and tailor it to your brand’s tone of voice and visual style.

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To conclude: competitor research is just one piece of the puzzle.

The best products don’t just replicate what’s out there — they evolve it into something better, faster, or more user-centric.

To summarise, there’s three key takeaways here:

• Competitor analysis is useful, but not a strategy. Copying should be one data point in decision-making, not the whole framework.
• Think in terms of the heriarchy of the evidence you’re using: whats primary, what’s secondary? Prioritise the customer over all else (no matter the hype something has).
• Table stakes features matter. If a feature is expected by users, not having it may block you from competing. This is more important in certain areas with high competition.

If you need help, try this decision-making framework:

Remember: competitor research as inspiration, not a blueprint.

Customers over competitors any day of the week.

Thank you SO much for reading (all the way to the bottom, wow look at you go). I thoroughly enjoyed writing this one - let me know what ya think.

In other news, I have capacity for a consultancy client - if you know of a B2B Saas or consumer mobile app looking for product growth support, send them my way.

See you next week,

🕺Rosie 🕺

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