Spot on. When you're building something largely new, a lot of your energy goes into just laying down the concepts and then iterating fiercely on them. For example, eventually you realise that the system should be based on Frammels, with flexible workflows that allow blahs. It might have taken you months to shake and distill things down to these clean, core concepts.
Someone else copying you doesn't need to go through all that. They don't need to walk in your shoes down to all the dead ends that you visited on your way to reaching enlightenment. They simply need to see your "Manage Frammels" screen and then have their own instant "aha" moment.
It's usually blindingly obvious what sort of data model lives behind the screens. And it's unlikely you have any killer edge in your UI code, or any of your code really (talking about SaaS here - not esoteric fields like database engines etc).
Copying is so much easier than creating. That's why having a head start is vital.
Someone else copying you doesn't need to go through all that. They don't need to walk in your shoes down to all the dead ends that you visited on your way to reaching enlightenment. They simply need to see your "Manage Frammels" screen and then have their own instant "aha" moment.
It's usually blindingly obvious what sort of data model lives behind the screens. And it's unlikely you have any killer edge in your UI code, or any of your code really (talking about SaaS here - not esoteric fields like database engines etc).
Copying is so much easier than creating. That's why having a head start is vital.