This past week, despite not being part of the team playing the T20 series against the Windies, India’s cricket captain and quite possibly the best batsman of this generation, Virat Kohli, was square and centre in the news, especially so on social media.

What triggered this particular news cycle was a video that started doing the rounds on Twitter of Virat Kohli reacting to a ‘mean tweet’ addressed to him. Someone, wearing their intent of irritating Kohli proudly on their sleeve, told Kohli that he was overrated as a batsman, as were other Indian batsmen, and that they preferred to watch English or Australian batsmen instead. Kohli’s reaction was essentially to tell this person to go live in England or Australia if he was a bigger fan of them, implying that Indians are somehow duty-bound to admire Indian batting.

I do not want to go into the merits and demerits of sportspersons, movie stars, and such, posturing themselves, intentionally or otherwise, as public intellectuals. But this whole Kohli fiasco has at least two lessons for entrepreneurs. This is especially relevant because captains of popular and successful sports teams almost always end up becoming role models, or at least some sort of aspirational figures, for entrepreneurs. And Kohli, having led India to many successes, and like any great entrepreneur, also personally profiting humongously thanks to the success of the team that he leads, finds himself more often than not, someone every wannabe entrepreneur looks up to for inspiration.

One. This whole idea of Virat Kohli reading mean tweets addressed to him was lifted from a popular and regular segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, a daily talk show from Los Angeles, USA. Whether scripted or extemporaneous, the reactions by various celebrities to mean tweets addressed to them are always light-hearted, and there is care taken to ensure that either the mean tweet or the response is funny enough to elicit some laughter. In the case of the Kohli video, neither the original mean tweet nor the reaction were in the same PIN code as light-hearted or funny. It is common, for startups especially, to try and recreate a model that has worked elsewhere.

But very easily, these copy cats may look like the original idea superficially, but having failed to get the true motivation or meaning of the original, they often tend to be horrible or unmemorable, or worse, horrible and remembered for all the wrong reasons. The graveyard of Indian startups is littered with many such poorly-thought-through clones of successful ideas from completely different markets. If you are copying, do a thorough and good job, and with all the adjustments needed for your market.

Two. This whole thing happened on what is ostensibly an official Virat Kohli app. This sort of a vanity app, that way too many celebrities seem to like the idea of, is a classic example of not going where your customers already are. If Virat Kohli controlled the narrative around himself on social media where the majority of his fans are, to the same extent as he does on the Kohli app, this video would never have surfaced when it did.

The author heads product at a mid-sized startup in the real estate space