My App Has Copycats Now

Three Reddit notifications came in over two hours this week, all from the same account, under a post I wrote about my app's growth. The first said "Nice post. You are one of my competitors in this apps category. You probably heard about my app. Enjoyed the read." The second asked how many monthly active users I have. The third asked if I would share my Claude.md — the config file that tells my AI coding tools how I build.

I haven't replied to him yet. This post is the reply.

The Pattern I Kept Half-Noticing

I build GainFrame in public. I've posted the $5,674 I wasted on ads, the full tool stack behind the business, and the SEO playbook that grew my organic traffic 15x. I do it because reading other people's real numbers is how I learned any of this, and because writing it down forces me to understand my own business.

For a couple of months I'd been noticing the same handful of accounts under everything I post. Some are competitors who say so openly, like the guy above. Others are newer accounts with no post history that only ever ask pipeline questions: what tools, what prompts, how do the comparison posts get made.

Each question on its own is normal. I ask people stuff like this all the time. Together, on a schedule, from accounts that only surface when I post, it reads like someone assembling a manual.

What the Copying Looks Like

In early May I shipped a batch of app reviews and comparison posts over about ten days. Nine days after the last one went live, a competitor's blog published more than 40 posts in a single day. Around 20 of them were my titles, near-verbatim: the same two app reviews, the same "best apps in 2026" angles, the same fitness-app-stack post, the same body fat stats pages. Their site also has a "their app vs GainFrame" comparison page.

A different app launched about seven weeks after mine with the same core loop: photo in, per-muscle-group scores out, weakest area named first, body fat and FFMI on every result. And there's an app on the App Store with literally the same name as mine, also doing progress photos for lifters, published two and a half weeks before my App Store release.

I'm not going to name or link any of them. If you're motivated you can find them in about 90 seconds, and that's exactly as much distribution as I'm willing to hand over.

One of Them Was First

One of those products is older than mine. Their domain went live about eight months before GainFrame existed. I didn't invent AI body analysis from photos, and nobody owns "point your camera at yourself and get a number." There are a dozen apps in this category and most of us arrived at the idea independently.

So the ideas aren't the issue. What got to me was the words. Titles I wrote at my kitchen table coming back nine days later with the serial numbers filed off. Watching that happen to a content plan you built one post at a time is genuinely nerve wracking, and I spent a bad evening wondering if sharing everything had been naive.

There's also nothing to do about it legally, which I'll say plainly so nobody suggests it. Blog titles and topics aren't copyrightable. A comparison page that names your app is fair use — I write those about competitors myself. Their post bodies are AI rewrites, and none of my actual prose was lifted. The only real response is the one that was always the plan: build better, ship faster, keep receipts.

The Numbers He Asked For

So, to the competitor who asked: here are the numbers, same as everyone else gets.

• $962 MRR as of this week
• 207 active subscriptions, 30 active trials
• Organic search went from about 30 clicks a day in mid-June to 160 to 186 a day this week
• On monthly actives: I don't have a MAU number I fully trust yet — my analytics setup drops a chunk of events — so paid subscriptions are the honest proxy I publish

You can check the revenue yourself: RevenueCat verified — GainFrame.

Here's why publishing that doesn't scare me. My site ranks for the cloned blog's brand name, and searches for it have surfaced my pages 15 times in the last three months. Fifteen impressions, zero clicks — that's roughly how many people are looking for them at all. My pages get over 7,000 impressions a day.

A title is the cheapest part of a post. The DEXA scan I ran against my own body, the 189 in-app survey responses, the app that ships every week, the readers who arrive from posts I wrote months ago — none of that copies over.

What I'm Changing

Three things.

Results ship immediately, mechanics ship later. I'll keep posting numbers the week they happen. The how — the prompts, the pipelines, the exact playbooks — now comes a month or so after it's already been compounding for me. If you copy me, you're copying my last quarter.

Questions get answered in public. I like helping other builders and that doesn't change. But it happens in the thread where everyone can read it, and I've stopped answering strategy questions in DMs. If an answer is worth giving, it's worth giving to all twelve people quietly taking notes along with the one asking.

And no, I'm not sharing my Claude.md. Most of it is boring project context anyway. But you asked for the one file whose whole job is to encode how I work, in a public comment, two hours after introducing yourself as my competitor. Respect the directness. Still no.

Building in public was never free. The deal was always that sharing compounds goodwill and traffic faster than it leaks strategy. Copycats are the leak side of that deal showing up on schedule. It's still a good deal.

Maybe one of them out-executes me someday. That was always possible, copycats or not. But the app ships every week, the posts keep compounding, and readers can tell which one of us has taken the photos. The work is still mine.

If you're building in public and dealing with your own copycats, I'd genuinely like to hear how you're handling it. And if a competitor is reading this: the numbers are above, no DM required.