Another way of saying this would be "it is harder to copy something than it is to make something". For example try building a successful search engine today, to beat Google at their own game, you need to solve all this technical problems plus beat a heavily intrenched incumbent. You can point to something like duck duck go and sure they did find a successful niche of privacy aware people that want to "degoogle" their lives, but even this doesn't mean that you can just be DuckDuckGo yourself.