Jake Castillo's view that saturation means proven demand (win with a novel, easier feature or a hyper-specific niche, and avoid social apps), Gleam's "copy Duolingo's defaults, add a twist", and Nami/Storemaven's warning against copying competitors' pricing and paywalls without knowing why.

Copy or innovate? Differentiating in a saturated category

TL;DR

“Saturated” = people are actively engaged. With a feature clearly better than incumbents’, the market is “ripe for the taking” (Cal AI vs typing every meal into MyFitnessPal).¹
Innovation = make it easier or make it cheaper.²
Don’t ship a plain clone of a winner in the same market; if you can’t think of something different, pick another niche.³
Niche down hard: “the workout tracker for new moms” makes marketing, creator choice, ad style and even UI obvious — style it like the apps that audience already uses.⁴⁵
Avoid social/network-effect apps (cold start) and anything you can’t improve; look for categories that haven’t changed in ~5 years.⁶
Copy proven UX defaults, innovate on the core: Gleam wasted time reinventing flows (voice onboarding was “catastrophic”) that Duolingo had already A/B-tested hundreds of times.⁷⁸

Details

Jake Castillo’s sequence (Jake Castillo): niche → marketing angle → UI. Knowing the ICP tells you what influencers, UGC creators and paid ads should look like.⁴ Any feature can be made “sexy” by gamifying or a unique spin — calorie tracking wasn’t fun before Cal AI.⁹ A niche also lets you charge more (Setting your first subscription price).¹⁰

Gleam’s version (Kelvin Zhang). Take what works as your defaults and add your twist on top for the best baseline metrics. They tested a premium (Equinox/Seed-style) brand against a Duolingo-like mascot style and chose the functional Duolingo direction because gamification, chests and animations fit it without feeling gimmicky.⁸¹¹

Don’t copy what you don’t understand (2022, Dan Burcaw). A common mistake is copying competitors’ prices and paywalls: “a pretty good app doing a pretty good job” isn’t the optimum, and if you mimic 8fit without knowing how it reached its choices you can’t iterate from there.¹²¹³ Host Esther Schatz: mid-core games all copied Supercell’s screaming-man icon, which only worked because Supercell had developed characters; when developers stopped copying they found better results.¹⁴

Invent something (Stella). Sarah Pearl ("Hot High Priestess") says the app space is full of copy-paste and Stella succeeded because nothing like it existed; she sees under-served problems women face that male builders don’t think of.¹⁵¹⁶

Disagreements / caveats

Straight copying worked when the market differed (Cal Buddy, Symmetry — Copying a proven app into another language or country). Jake’s “don’t clone” is about the same market.
Steve P. Young’s Finding app ideas from search demand — the Tentacle Strategy also borrows proven demand but targets an un-owned keyword rather than a better feature.
Gleam’s “copy defaults” vs Nami’s “don’t copy blindly”: compatible if you copy tested UX patterns but still run your own tests on price and paywall.

Copy or innovate? Differentiating in a "saturated" app category

Copy or innovate? Differentiating in a saturated category

TL;DR

Details

Disagreements / caveats

See also

Copy or innovate? Differentiating in a "saturated" app category

Copy or innovate? Differentiating in a saturated category

TL;DR

Details

Disagreements / caveats

See also

Footnotes