If anyone can vibe-code an MVP in a weekend, what makes your product different?
It's crazy how easy building something from scratch has become, but one thing I’ve noticed lately is that more and more products look fresh on the surface, yet feel almost identical underneath.
I see this every day scrolling the PH daily dashboard, struggling to spot the real difference between dozens of products claiming to be the next Lovable with a twist, another distraction-free productivity app, or yet another AI voice assistant.
Just like with copywriting or design, product concepts are starting to feel homogeneous.
It’s as if we’re all feeding the same prompts to ChatGPT or Claude, resulting in ideas that seem original at first glance, but are terribly similar once you look under the hood.
So my question is: if building has become so easy, what makes the real difference?
Building a loyal base of believers who stick with you regardless of clones?
Out-shipping everyone else with updates and new features?
Having the most polished, beautiful product that wins on pure vibes and perception?
Creating an interface and UX so frictionless that similar apps just can't compete?
Probably, it's a mix of all the above, but I’m curious to know if one particular aspect is more important for you and makes a real difference for your product.
Replies
I think building is the easy part now. the hard part is getting people to keep coming back after the fisrt try.
@kabir_suleman_kusfa I agree! For you, what's the most effective strategy to make people keep coming back?
The pattern I keep noticing is that founders solve the visible problem instead of the actual one. Ten AI note takers look the same because they were all built to solve "I forgot what was said," not "I do not trust what I remember from the last three meetings." The second problem is narrower and usually specific to how one type of person actually works, so it does not clone as easily. I found the same thing running three different small businesses at once, the software that felt different was never the one with the nicest interface, it was the one that seemed to understand what actually breaks in my kind of business instead of business in general.
@stacywycof83995 that's a very interesting point! Many founders stop at the surface level of a problem, inadvertently hindering their chances of success. Do you think that spending more time on strategy (discovering more details about their possible users, go deeper into why their product is important and different, and so on) would help them build more original apps?
@pamela_arienti Strategy helps, but only the part of strategy that forces contact with a real person's actual day. I have watched founders spend weeks on positioning workshops and still ship something generic, because the research stayed abstract, personas and slides, instead of sitting with one specific person and watching where their process actually breaks. The founders who build something original are usually the ones who got uncomfortably specific about one type of person's mess before they got specific about their own product.
None of your four, I think, and I say that having tried three of them.
All four are things a clone can also do in a weekend. Polish especially. If your moat is UX, someone screenshots it on Sunday and ships it on Monday.
The thing that doesn't copy is evidence. Not a testimonial wall, the specific stuff: this named person at this company had this problem, here's the number before and after, here's them saying it in their own words. A competitor can clone every feature you have and still can't clone that, because it requires having had customers for long enough that they can describe what changed. It's the one asset that gets more expensive to replicate the longer you've existed.
I'd also push back gently on the premise. I don't think products feel homogeneous because building got easy. They feel homogeneous because everyone is describing what the thing does, and capability descriptions converge, they always have. Two products doing the same job will always sound identical when described by their makers. They stop sounding identical the moment actual users describe them, because users talk about their own situation and no two of those are the same.
So the difference isn't something you build. It's something you go and collect, and most people skip it because it's slow and it involves asking.
@venkat_a2 I always try to keep updated and then, discover something new. I didn't know that even UX was so easy to replicate. It seems like, as you say, everything can be cloned nowadays. In which case, I agree with you, the only thing that can't be replicated is real people talking about their personal experience with the product.
I feel like the fact that products look the same goes a bit beyond the makers' descriptions, and also a bit beyond my statement about building being easy. I think (but that's just my opinion) makers lately are heavily focusing on AI, which makes sense considering that it will become more and more important. So, they think about what they can do with AI or which apps could be integrated into bigger systems like ChatGPT or Claude.
I understand it, but I feel like it restricts a bit the opportunity to build something truly different and original. Although AI is important, I think there could be other products not directly connected to it out there that could still be useful. Or at least, I hope our lives won't completely revolve around AI 🙈