I am not trying to copy Patreon. I am merely implementing the general idea of selling your digital content online. That's all. If people like Patreon and their monetization channels, I am not here to try and steal them away. Not my intention whatsoever. I am doing a lot of things very differently to Patreon.
> I am actually developing a platform to compete with pateon. And the author is quite naive in his complaints.
> I am not trying to copy Patreon. I am merely implementing the general idea of selling your digital content online. That's all.
You should stop posting, honestly. Either you tried to gather interest for your project by posting in a Patreon thread, or you've realized how little you actually know and you are backtracking.
Best to cut your losses, revisit what you are working on, make sure you have a clear path and you've verified it's what customers want, and build something you can show before talking about it.
> I am actually developing a platform to compete with pateon.
This was you in the original post. If you consider Patreon a competitor, then you need to understand their business model far better than you apparently do. You don't need to copy them, but you do need to understand them. You cannot compete with an established company that you have given zero effort to understand.
No, you don't. That would be simply copying them and going head to head against them. I am doing neither. Just because I am taking the general idea of selling digital content does not mean I have to know what exactly patreon does or or how it does it or that I have to do the same thing. It is like complaining that Yahoo mail isn't exactly the same as gmail. Or Office365 is not the same as google docs. The general idea is the same, but the implementation is nothing alike. If you cannot grasp that concept, I have nothing else to say to you.
I'm explicitly not saying that you should copy them, I'm saying you should understand them. What makes them tick? Why did people choose them? What do they do well? What do they do poorly?
The fact that you're having such a hard time understanding the difference between researching your competition and copying them is further proof that you aren't ready to be running a startup—you have a lot to learn about business before you're going to get anywhere. If you're dead set on continuing, it would be a good idea to learn a bit of humility and consider that maybe, just maybe, the dozen-or-so people on a startup forum telling you that you're wrong might know something you don't.
