TL;DR: Copy startups that have a significant barrier to entry in a country where you are familiar with ways to overcome said barrier. Use your knowledge of local regulations and how to maneuver them in your advantage. In general: aim to be a country-scoped Stripe versus a country-scoped Pinterest or Twitter.<p>My take (only slightly off-topic): While I emphatically agree with the author on the types of startup one should aim to clone locally, I see little discussion regarding the inherent difficulties of even starting <i>any kind</i> of business in many countries. Mandatory <i>expensive</i> social insurance, high company formation costs, bureaucracy, all make bootstrapping prohibitive. In other words, maybe the problem isn't getting inspiration for the proper kind of startup to clone; it's finding a way to get the ball rolling.
There's still a lot of cases where it's very hard for even a consumer-facing US-based web startup to get traction in another country, for language and cultural reasons. Japan is a particularly notable case; it's often said that companies without an office in Japan never succeed there. Some examples:<p><i>Pixiv</i> vs. DeviantArt<p><i>Mixi</i> vs. Facebook<p><i>Nico Nico Douga</i> vs. Youtube<p>China is an even more extreme case, though that also has problems of corruption, legal wrangling, censorship, and so on.
I disagree. Sure, they're the bigger name HERE in the US, but when you clone a startup that hasn't moved overseas yet, the clone becomes the bigger name, e.g. Renren, the facebook clone. Facebook is available in china, but I don't see them gaining "100% of the user market". A clone that gets traction early on can dominate the market.
The advice about cloning a regulated startup is wise in that meeting a certain set of regulatory requirements can be a great differentiator. That said, the specific experience, network, and skill set required by a team to crack a particularly regulatory regime is if anything tougher to assemble than to crack a particular technical problem.