The first thing I learned when venturing into my entrepreneurial journey is that you will find a lot of people trying to copy your ideas. Some of them will tell you that your idea will not work and then go out trying to replicate it in their products. Few of them would go one step further and blatantly copy exact lines from your discussion, website and pitches.

At first this used to irritated me, make me really angry. My defense mechanism was to go in my shell and share less with the next person I met. But, eventually I realized something, my ideas benefited more from having an open discussion with people, than they suffered from copycats trying to replicate them. This lead me to another conclusion, ideas are easy to come by what matters is the execution and the passion to keep working on the idea until it transforms into a great product.

You are doing what you because you are passionate about it and you believe that there are better ways of doing something, than the approaches available today. That is something no one can ever copy. You are the only one who can sacrifice everything to turn that idea into a reality, you will keep working on it forgetting things like hunger and sleep till you see yours users happy with what they are using.

Once you stop worrying about people trying to copy you and focus on refining your ideas, make a better product for your users and continuously innovate upon it, the copycats will always play catch-up. People copy because they are too lazy to come up with the next best idea, work with their users to refine their experience. For them a few extra bucks is better than building a sustainable product and great user experience. They can never match your never give up attitude and drive, to get better with every experience.

Now when I see someone trying to copy my ideas I go read feedback from my end users and see how/why my approach is better than anyone else's. I keep my focus on my idea, my product rather than trying to out smart a copy cat. Time and time again I have seen this pay off when clients try to compare our products to a copycat and realize how much better, innovative our offering is without us even having to spell it out for them.

To all those entrepreneurs who worry about copycats winning, I would say they can copy an idea, not your grit and thought process which turns that idea into a reality. Don't worry about the noise, focus on what your clients/users are saying about your product, keep innovating and perfecting your idea. See your copycats trying to play catch-up as the distance grows because this is a marathon not a sprint. Also remember, imitation is the sincerest  for of flattery !