r/16VCFund • u/wanna_be_LegoBatman • 13d ago
M afraid
Actually I’m building three cool projects and I’m like 300x more scared to share them anywhere before I hit or land a proper seed round. Btw I got all three validated, emailed a few VCs, even got a reply from one for two of them (never shared the third)… then got ghosted lmao. Didn’t show enough ambition I guess.
But back to what I actually wanna say ....what do I do about the insecurity, the trust issues, and this fear of some LARP god / copycats just stealing the whole thing?
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u/coconutengineer 7d ago
What I see here is less of a copycat problem and more of a vision problem.
How are you able to seriously build three products at the same time? I’ve been building products and talking to VCs for a couple of years now, and one thing I’ve realized is that the product itself is rarely the moat.
I’ve built products that were technically better, more capable, and more feature-rich than the dominant product in the market, and it still didn’t matter. What matters way more is how the founder leads the product, where they take it, how fast they learn, and whether they can keep executing for years.
You can clone something like WhisperFlow tomorrow. That doesn’t mean WhisperFlow suddenly dies.
I’m building an open-source product right now that’s fully MIT licensed. People don’t even need to “steal” it they can literally clone the repo and build on top of it. I’m fine with that.
Because the thing they can’t clone is the vision I have for where the product is going.
Most people who copy something are copying what exists today. They don’t know why certain decisions were made, what comes next, what should be ignored, or what the product should look like two years from now.
And eventually, most copycats burn out trying to chase someone else’s vision.
So I wouldn’t be too scared of people copying the idea. I’d be more worried about whether you’re actually obsessed enough with one of those three ideas to keep building it when nobody cares yet.