Counterpoint: lots of money can be made if you're late to the party but have a great new spin on it. Assuming the party's big enough to accomodate multiple players, and not a natural winner-takes-all situation.
Apple arguably did this with the iPod.
IBM targeted a business market that hadn't really been seriously targeted by the "hobbyist" systems. The Compaq was really at the spearhead of the clones. (And IBM subsequently whiffed with the PS/2 and OS/2.) And then Dell revolutionized distribution. And even that is a gross over-simplification.
The one ingredient missing is that you often also need a pile of capital to strong-arm yourself into the market and become a viable competitor. There's definitely an optimal point to do this as someone else pointed out: too early and you suffer the market exploration costs and failure risks, too late and you may never catch up.
I personally don't think these sorts of strategies should exist from a perspective of principals (it encourages capital to copy, not innovative, and further punishes those who take on the real risks who are disproportionately awarded) but they do. This why IP protections like patents came about in the first place, but these systems too have been gamed so far they often make little sense anymore either (e.g. slight derivations of existing patents that mimic the same functional outcomes but are allowed just to name one perverse abuse of the patent system--still allows a high degree of copying).
I think the latter (joining late) can often be overcome with more capital though. The issue often isn't that you can't catch up, it's that it's often not worth the investment and risk perceived by investors with sufficient capital to try and split any existing market and innovative over what exists, especially if it's capital intensive. There are usually other lower barrier to entry markets to muscle into and get money out of.
To play devil's advocate - what about network effects? There are plenty of examples where a possibly inferior service built a moat around itself through network effects, preventing a potentially better rival from competing.
It’s not a binary choice between copy or innovate. Many successful clones made significant innovations atop a basic category defined by a less successful first mover.
So did Google — remember AltaVista? [0]
The micro-HDD that let you carry an actually useful amount of music was the other big feature. They weren't the first to have a big drive, but they were the first that had a big drive and a useable music store.
"Not tinder" at the point where a "not tinder" was due to emerge.
Dating apps always run on the same cycle.
No dating app solves the fundamental problem of women in this day and age have a totally distorted view of the range of "attractiveness" for men.
Can you explain what you mean? Are you saying that the reason that modern dating is hard is because women are too selective?
https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyo...
That's a gigantic problem in that even if a woman estimates herself correctly relative to other females, she totally mis-estimates the men she's equivalent to.
Men, on the other hand, understand female attractiveness quite well. However, they put in a lot of effort to land that female that punches above their weight in attractiveness.
All the data says is that women think that the average man on OkCupid in 2009 is less attractive than the average man.
Your conclusion: women don't rate mens' attractiveness accurately.
Another conclusion: the average man on a dating site is less attractive than the average man.
Another conclusion: women and men interpret the survey question differently.
You also make the additional assumption that this is some sort of fundamental problem, but that's a separate issue.
The female estimate looks like a power curve from zero.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyo...