You're dealing with the "fast follower" concept, here. To me the biggest issue is planning ahead since you know this is going to happen. If you are entering the market without a defensible position then it's going to be easier for someone to clone you and try to hack their way to faster growth. I think the real question is how do you build some competitive advantage into your business model that cannot be cloned. In essence that's the "secret sauce" that most pitches say they have, although many of them don't turn out to be actually a defensible position.

Perhaps there's some value in being "the original" or positioning yourself as the high quality solution. The question becomes is the competition as good or better? There are a lot of great businesses that entered markets because they could make iterative improvements by learning from the mistakes of the first mover.