Build a copycat product?

Rocket Internet is famous for cloning, I haven't looked into it in detail though. Seems like they had money to spend.

I imagine as long as you add some kind of distinguishing feature to separate you from a market leader, you'll do quite well. :)

You can copy the features, but you don't know why that product have those features.

And to know why a feature is useful, and even more important, how good is that product at solving the problem, you have to do customer development (talking to customers).

Believe me, I started cloning apps and then I had to do customer development anyway.

People focus too much on the idea/features when thinking about building something, but it's execution that wins the day. UX Strategy, customer development, marketing, adapting to user needs, building a solid code base, etc. Those are what make a lasting and great product, not the idea.

Cloning gets you the features and helps with market validation, but you have no idea how they came up with the feature set and whether they know what they're doing or not. A big, well-funded team will churn out bad features all the time because they have resources to burn. You could waste a lot of time copying bad features if you don't understand your users.

This article cleared a lot up for me check @robwalling out. Hes awesome.
https://medium.com/@robwalling/today-we-do-our-best-to-fix-what-you-hate-about-email-marketing-software-3e4d3299edeb

There is of course, but you don't want to start yourself off at a likely disadvantage. There are so many new and distinct businesses out there waiting to be founded, why limit yourself to things that are already working well in SaaS? That said, in the field of hard-tech startups, many successes are the #2 to market (the first company burns up all their funding figuring out what works, and the second stands on their shoulders, then hires from the wreckage). Perhaps a less strong equivalent effect applies to SaaS, if you've found someone doing particularly badly in all areas.

In my town, I see a lot of coffee shop beside starbucks. They get a lot of customer too.

Yes

There are a lot of different ways to copycat, from direct cloning like Zynga, which I don't like and probably won't work if you don't have a more efficient customer acquisition channel (which is why it worked for Zynga), to something totally different, with a lot of space in the middle.

A great example of this at the time was Salesforce. Hard to remember now, but they positioned themselves as the easy, inexpensive alternative to Siebel. (Now I position www.mimiran.com against Salesforce.) Mailchimp positioned themselves against enterprise email solutions and now MailerLite positions themselves against Mailchimp. These are not feature-for-feature clones, but they are broadly similar options that people might consider together before purchasing. Rather than assaulting the established companies' market position head-on, they try to carve out a subniche and take advantage of the marketing of the bigger firm.

Last I checked, Salesforce was a pretty big company, but if you'd asked people in 1999 if taking on Siebel in the CRM market was a good idea, most of them would have said "NO!".

So I guess I'd suggest considering if there are wrinkles on the products you see that could help you stand out. "It's like X, but for people who need Y [that X doesn't do]"

The advantage of cloning an idea is that you know your market exists and it also simplifies the early parts of product development

You don't have to cater to the same market as they are doing. You can target a different or smaller market that they are not looking into. That would help those other customers as well.

There's nothing wrong with entering an existing market. When you do that it's smarter to look at multiple products and pick the best features instead of just copying 1 competitor.
Combine that with the fact that you will probably start to think about doing some things your way you will still end with a unique product.
Nothing wrong with that!

I have asked a same question before :)
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/5f48380f82

Yes I think it is fine to replicate a business as long there aren't too many copy cats.