When it comes to early stage growth marketing, imitation is often better than creation.

When you look In the early days of Uber or Lyft, they were known to copy each other on offers, features and more. A recent look at Instagram shows how they’ve added new features to their product over the past few years to fend off competitors like Snapchat (Stories) and TikTok (Reels).

Here’s a lesson: If you don’t mimic what growth marketing industry leaders are doing in your vertical as a startup, you’ll be adding months and possibly years of unnecessary experimentation to your timeline. To be clear, I’m not implying that you should be copying your competitors’ website designs and publishing them verbatim. There’s a fine line between copying everything a competitor does right and using outside frameworks while adding your own flavor – make sure you do the latter.

But if the top players are using imitation strategies strategically, it is more beneficial to imitate as a beginner. Instagram is a multi-billion dollar company today and you’re still reaping the benefits! However, it’s more important for beginners to emulate than established players because the pockets aren’t as deep.

I’ll use the Triple I model to help you understand the startup curve and add a few examples from my days working on the Postmates development team.

Triple I model

The Triad I model consists of three pillars: Imitation, Repetition, and Innovation. As a beginner, you will have opportunities to do all of these, but how you emphasize each will be critical in the early stages.

In the early years of trying to gain traction, most of your time and attention should be focused on imitating successful marketing strategies. This means drawing inspiration from their competitors’ advertising, emails, website and other consumer touch points.

The type of messaging should vary over time. Image: Jonathan Martinez

Iteration can happen all at once as you gain success from simulation, and it should be a constant process to improve metrics. If you feel you have an important idea that you want to explore, go ahead. I’m not saying you shouldn’t innovate. I did this while consulting for a small seed-starter.

What I’m saying is that there’s more to your startup than devoting resources to creative uncertainty. No need to constantly reinvent the wheel. Save your resources to innovate for high-probability experiments that you’ll be excited to try at different stages of your startup’s life.

However, it should be said that these ‘home run swings’ should be reserved for testing when sufficient resources are available.

Cheating on paid purchases

At the post office, I spent most of my time developing our acquisition efforts. We grew from $50,000 a month to $5 million a month. After raising $300 million in Series E, we had more financial resources to launch new paid channels. However, we still did not have enough resources on the design side. Our team had to be crafty in repurposing or imitating designs that Dordash and other competitors were launching. I personally monitor the competitors and their ad libraries every week to make sure we stay on top of any trends.