How does one prevent their start-up from being knocked-off?
barry-cotter: <flip>Iterating and improving really, really fast.</flip>I have nothing remotely resembling any real insight into this, but for something like a pure play internet startup where the barriers to entry are pretty small, it seems like app quality, luck and bloody-minded perseverance are probably the most important factors and you only have any real control over two of those.Web focused analysis followsPatents - This is obviously great if you can get it, but I'd say the space of possible startup ideas that are coverable by patents that enable you to exploit monopoly power is a lot smaller than the ones that don't.Copyrights - Well that'll stop someone stealing your name, but what else have you got? Maybe "look and feel" but even that pushes it. It also requires lawyers, which are well, expensive.Creating a Strong Brand - Requires you to have enough users who like you to use your product and get some buzz. Reduces to building a good product.Creating a Following _^_Blog - That'll really help with your page rank in the beginning if you update regularly and is a way to build community but it doesn't really have anything to do with preventing knockoffs. If your stuff is good you'll get to the stage where the vast majority of your users aren't even aware you have a blog.PR & SEO - Worth doing only if you have something people will stick around for after they get to your site. You must have something there first.Making the Product Complicated - You mean having solutions to non trivial problems baked into your product? Now that raises the barriers to cloning substantially. And unless you're solving a Hard Problem that has no value proposition (which would be a kick in the teeth if you discovered that was what you'd done afterwards) you've made your product better. As has been mentioned by pg, if you're considering two ways of doing something, one of which is harder, the harder one is almost certainly teh one to go for, because you're only considering it because you know it's better.Trade Secrets - I was going to diss this one but it's actually among the best on the list, and is I think more or less the same as above.