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Recently, I have been busy with financing and products. I often chat with some start-up partners and investors. When you talk about your company’s products and things with startup bosses or investors, it is easy to come up with one topic: why do you feel that your product is better than other competing products on the market? In other words: What are the core values of your company’s products? And further, how can your model, your product, not be copied?

In fact, questions like this are often asked when you are going to talk to investors about raising money. Through this period of experience, I think investors are most concerned about the three questions:

  1. What are the profit models of your products?

  2. What should you do with the money I invested in you? Or how?

  3. What are the core values of your products? How do you do or think your product and model will not be copied?

As an investor, of course, the most important thing is the return, otherwise why would people put money into you? Benefits? They’re capitalists, not welfare homes. So the profit model of the company’s products is the most important, and I give you the money, how do you want to spend it? How to spend is a knowledge, spend good to make money, spend bad that may really be when the beggar. No matter how you make money, or how you spend it, it’s essentially based on the core values of your products and a model that can’t be replicated. So instead of talking about how to spend money and how to make money, we’re talking about how to make your company’s products and models a “barrier to entry” in the industry. So as not to be easily copied and imitated.

Now the Internet era, is the world of giants, if you have any good entrepreneurial ideas and ideas, if you do not establish their own moat, it is easy to be broken by these giants, be copied, once the giant, sweeping thousands of troops, you will be finished. Now it is either to be acquired or to be imitated and surpassed. The alternative, of course, is to be acquired. It’s much better if your product can’t be easily copied.

How to prevent products from being copied and models from being copied?

1. Apply for patents

I know patent protection is still weak in our country, but that doesn’t mean it won’t work in the future. So at the beginning of product design, we should apply for a patent in time. At the very least, a patent is a proof of your product idea, a protective cover. Even patenting won’t stop plagiarism, because big companies aren’t afraid to Sue because they have money that you can’t afford. Big companies have strong legal support and lawsuits are common to them, but small companies are different.

However, even if the patent application, the degree of protection may not be high, but there should be some should still have. With patents, the law may not protect you completely, but at least it can make you stand on the highest point of morality and reason.

2. Choose the hardest route

In the book Hackers and Painters, it says: If there are two candidates for a new feature, and they create exactly the same value, we choose the one that is more difficult. Not because it brings in higher, more revenue, but because it’s harder. Maybe you don’t understand what that means, okay? My general explanation is that the way to achieve the difficulty of choice is to drag competitors into the quagmire and swamp. Startups are like guerrillas, and big companies are like regular armies. We choose to base ourselves in mountains and forests that are difficult to survive, and the regular government army can’t go there.

We spend all day thinking about these horrible technical problems, and our competitors are more scared and lazy and think they can’t solve them. The best defense is offense, and if you develop a technology that competitors can’t copy, that’s good enough.

3. Form accumulated value

This point is what I saw in the column of erye of Geek time. I feel it is particularly right and inspired me a lot. Second master Qiu Yue said: do not build the product moat on the face. It must be clear that product Idea, product interface and functional flow can not become a real barrier to competition. To think that one can be invincible by designing a genius interface is to put oneself in a very dangerous situation at the beginning of design and put the fate in the hands of others. So what? Er Ye also said: copycats can copy product features, but not data and users. The accumulation of data and the involvement of users must be considered in product design. A set of mechanisms should be designed: the more users use the product, the greater the value of the product to users, or the more users use the product, the greater the value of the product (also known as network effects).

Look at Taobao, Alipay, they have introduced credit into their products. Taobao gives merchants credit accumulation, diamond, crown and so on, alipay gives users sesame credit. These little by little accumulated things can give you some proof and bring some value, increase the stickiness of users, users, customers migration costs are very high, naturally will not easily lose customers.

If you are the first to do similar products and patterns, platform, when you are in the initial design should be taken into account, because when you start to fire, in fact you have been up for a long time, the accumulation of these, to fire the copied by others, you copy, because the value of these things is not be copied and copy your point in a passive core value.

Therefore, when we design a product, platform or model, we should take into account the product form and mechanism that can create the cumulative effect, which will definitely be useful in the future.

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conclusion

Honestly, in this day and age, it’s hard to make a product that can’t be easily copied and copied. Technology and products are barriers to entry. It’s too hard. There are no secrets in today’s technology, especially in the world of programming. It’s not like the high-tech manufacturing and military industries. Product ideas are everywhere, and there are countless products with the same function in the app store. In this era, how to make different products without being copied and copied, and how to make your own core values is really difficult. We can only start from the above three points, strive to make barriers, and this barrier others have ways to climb over, whether climbing a ladder or by spaceship, can be over, what we do is before we do big, delay their time, strive for the fastest to occupy the market.