Case 128 · My own product
What do you do when an AI-built clone copies your product?
The situation: One of my own products — a puzzle game for weddings, on the market since 2016. After ten years a clone shows up: same idea, similar features, put together with AI in four weeks. What took a decade to grow, someone now rebuilds in a month. This case is about me — which is why I can tell it without anonymising anything.
AuthorMatthias EgerCertified Manager for Applied AI Transformation (IHK)The solution: don't defend the product. Dig the moat.
The first reflex would be the feature race: rebuild whatever the clone does differently, be faster, get cheaper. That race is exactly the one you can no longer win — anyone who builds a product with AI in four weeks will match a feature in four days. Building has become cheap. So I defended the one thing the clone cannot copy: distribution.
Three things that only come with time: Real reviews from ten years of satisfied customers — nobody collects those in four weeks. A printing service that turns the digital product into something physical — logistics and quality that code alone does not replace. And the domain history: ten years of trust with Google and in AI answers that cite sources instead of ranking pages. The work went into those three things — not into new features. Evidence: the product, live on the market ↗
10 yrs head start that no weekend clone can copy. The clone can rebuild every feature — but not ten years of reviews, not a service that runs smoothly, and not a domain that search engines and AI systems have trusted for a decade. The product holds its position.
Why this works — and where the limit is.
AI can clone code, copy, layout — the entire surface of a product. What it cannot clone: everything that took time. And there was one more thing it could not supply — the decision itself. Recognising that the feature race is lost and the moat is the answer was a human judgement: market knowledge, customer understanding, calm instead of reflex. The same rule my own business runs on — AI does the work, the human decides.
“Anyone can clone features. Nobody clones a moat built over ten years.”
Does this transfer to your business?
This case transfers to any digital product that attracts imitators. So, before long: all of them. Once building becomes cheap, every visibly successful product gets imitators — the question is not whether, but when. The answer is better settled beforehand: which of your strengths take time rather than money? Reviews, customer relationships, service, visibility — that is the moat you can dig before the clone turns up.
Does your product already have imitators?
30 minutes, three starting points in writing — free and with no sales pressure.