It’s a widely held, but completely incorrect, belief that you must mimic a competitor in order to compete. Think about Stripe. They went up against PayPal with a very small API and little else. Start small with a core product that’s useful and addresses a market problem. In PayPal’s case, that problem was the overcomplexity of their APIs and the pain of programming to them—a side effect of being a big established competitor with many (too many, I’d argue) features. Stripe came along with a tiny product that did only a fraction of what PayPal did, but it addressed that single, critical, pain point.

Source: x.com/allenholub/status/1824242420638441499