Copying Alone Will Not Bring Success

Source and verification limitations (2026-11-02): The post is tagged Wu Bofan’s weekly business commentary. A matching original manuscript was not obtained. A speech by the same author from another year cannot replace the original source. Descriptions of Taojiji and Qutoutiao copying others, claims that any wrong step guarantees failure, and the all-or-none principle are commentary or analogies, not universally valid laws of entrepreneurship. The original post did not include a directly comparable URL for the same text. ---- #Copying Alone Will Not Bring Success Today, seeing Pinduoduo’s success, some people copy almost everything about its business model and operating philosophy—even choosing a similar name: Taojiji. Another company saw Toutiao’s success and copied its operating and management ideas, with a name that almost pays tribute to it: Qutoutiao. Why is it hard to succeed by copying? There are three constraints on copying in entrepreneurship. --- First, you think you are copying, but however closely you imitate, you are still like a blind person trying to understand an elephant by touch. Taojiji and Qutoutiao, for example, thought they had identified the essence of success: reaching lower-tier markets. Do that, and every problem would be solved. Yet lower-tier market penetration was only one characteristic of Pinduoduo and Toutiao—a small tag, perhaps not even a particularly important one. You touch the elephant’s tail, conclude that an elephant is a rope, then go all out to copy it. Obstacles follow one after another. The second constraint is that the successful company’s presence has fundamentally changed the environment. Imagine an empty plot where someone plants a tree. It flourishes and bears abundant fruit. You buy the same kind of sapling and plant it almost in the same spot, right beside the first, copying even its location. That is precisely the problem. Before a company succeeded, it did not exist; once it emerges and succeeds, it quietly but profoundly changes the market. The market may no longer need a second company of that kind. Everything you do is right, but you are copying beside a large tree. Grass cannot grow under it, let alone another tree. Sometimes imitators cannot succeed because the successful company has already transformed the market environment. The third constraint is timing. Real estate’s maxim is “location, location, location”; entrepreneurship’s is “timing, timing, timing.” Even if everything else is right, the wrong timing makes it all wrong. Think carefully about what entrepreneurial success means. It is an outcome with countless causes and factors: static and dynamic, visible and hidden. Getting one or some of these right does not guarantee success. But getting a single point wrong may cause you to lose everything. Getting one, several, or even most things right still does not guarantee success: they are insufficient to make it happen. Yet one mistake can cause immediate failure: it is enough to ruin the effort. Comparing entrepreneurship to rock climbing is apt. Every step is difficult, important, and dangerous. One wrong step can be fatal, while one correct step does not guarantee reaching the summit. This is a harsh reality: what is insufficient to ensure success may still be sufficient to cause failure. Another way to express this is the “all or none” principle: either everything or zero. If the university entrance cutoff is 500 and you score 499, for example, that is the same as scoring zero. When you start a business by copying, you think you are reproducing success, but you cannot actually do so completely. We could summarize this in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek “law of incomplete copying”: in practice, copying cannot succeed. ----- Friends who are starting or considering businesses should watch for common early-stage ailments. Two are particularly widespread. One is “PhD syndrome”: I have specialized knowledge and many patents; my patents represent excellent technology, so I can turn it into a good product that must win in the market. If the market rejects it, the market is wrong, not me—these customers are not good enough. You can imagine the outcome of that approach and attitude. The other is “secret manual syndrome.” In martial arts novels, someone endures immense hardship and overcomes countless obstacles to find a secret manual. Once they obtain it, they can dominate the martial arts world. Such novels are fairy tales for adults. This is fairy-tale thinking: solve one problem, and all problems are solved. Believing that following a successful company’s secret formula will guarantee your own success is, to some extent, the same as PhD syndrome. --- What approach and attitude should we take? It is simple: discover hidden but significant problems, obstacles, and needs that others have not recognized. That is one side of the coin. On the other, companies encounter their own series of difficulties when building products or services: major cost barriers, user-interface problems, and further problems arising as they address the first ones. If, on your side, you can both identify and solve those difficulties—including the difficulties within the difficulties—you have found a point of leverage for entrepreneurship. Secret formulas for success cannot provide that leverage. Alibaba, ByteDance, and Pinduoduo did not simply copy another company. The best approach may look like copying on the surface, while you have already recognized enormous blind spots—even entire missing dimensions—in incumbents’ understanding of markets and customers. Your venture can succeed when technology, social conditions, income levels, and other circumstances have quietly become sufficient for you to solve those problems. We can see this in ByteDance and Pinduoduo. #得到 #吳伯凡每周商業評論