The Clone Strategy

Source
TL;DR	Don’t invent — copy something already making millions and make it 1% different: a tighter niche, a simpler product, or a cheaper price. Innovation is the risk; the clone removes it.

What it means

Find software already succeeding (public MRR, valued competitors, crowded reviews) and capture a slice of its proven demand.
Market risk is gone before you start — only execution remains.
Three flavors: copy the flow into a new niche, copy the product and undercut, or copy the category and win on simplicity.

Validation is the whole point.

Samuel’s rule: “never build anything that doesn’t already exist and isn’t validated by founders sharing MRR screenshots” (i-cloned-3-apps-and-now-make-35k-month).
Devon: “Don’t create a new market… study competitors’ core flows, come up with a 1% increment in quality” (i-made-65k-in-3-days-with-zero-audience). This is idea-validation by proxy.

Flavor 1 — same flow, new niche.

David Adius cloned smoking-cessation app Quitter screen-by-screen, swapped target to sugar cravings → $12k/month in 5 months (i-found-a-successful-app-made-it-1-different-and-now-ma).
The onboarding psychology already converts; you just re-aim it. Cloned screens are also fast to build (vibe-coding).

Flavor 2 — same product, lower price.

Abhishek built EUform when Typeform went up-market: 90% of features free + one-click migration (i-copied-a-100m-saas-undercut-their-prices-and-made-10k).
When an incumbent abandons the low end, the crumbs are a real business.

Flavor 3 — same category, radical simplicity.

Anton took validated AI transcription and won purely on simplicity — Letterly, $250k/month (this-simple-app-makes-250k-per-month).
David’s Shipper cloned a $6B AI app-builder, tripled down on one underserved pain: “owning 1% of the market would be life-changing” (i-built-a-micro-version-of-a-1b-saas-now-i-make-50k-mon).

Even the marketing is cloneable.

Steven scrolled TikTok 7 days, filtered competitors’ most-liked videos, reverse-engineered hooks into a spreadsheet (the-1m-mobile-app-playbook).

The caveat: a clone with no edge is just a worse copy.

Every winner added one differentiator — niche, price, simplicity, migration hook. The 1% is where the money is.
The most valuable thing to steal is the onboarding + paywall flow (mobile-app-monetization).

Do this, not that: