someone shipped four items off my public roadmap nine days after i posted it

The list was never the asset. Anyone who has spent a week with the same customers can write your roadmap, and if they cannot, they are not really in your market.

That said I did change what I publish after something similar. I stopped posting plans and started posting only what shipped, with the detail of how it went. Nobody can front run a changelog. The roadmap moved to a page my paying customers can see when they log in, which turned out to be better anyway because the people who care most are now the only ones reading it.

What you cannot publish is the twenty conversations that told you which of those six mattered. That is the part they do not have, and it is why their version tends to be a shape without a reason.

Nine days is not a build, it is a landing page. Nobody ships four features in nine days including QA and billing changes.

Before you rewrite your whole approach, go and check. Look at their site in the wayback machine and see when the page first appeared. Look at when the domain was registered. Look at their changelog if they have one, and their public repo if they have one. If they have a support docs site, those pages have dates on them too.

What I would expect you to find is that they were already building this and the only thing they took from you was wording. Which is worth knowing, because it means your wording is good enough to steal, and that is a strange sort of compliment about your positioning.

Counterintuitive numbers from my side. The month after a near clone of my thing launched, my signups went up about twelve percent and stayed there.

Two of them told me they had been comparing us, which means the clone did the category education I could not afford to do. That only works if you are the one with the reviews, the docs and the two years of changelog. If you are both nine days old, competition is just noise.

So the practical question is not whether they copied you. It is whether a buyer comparing the two pages side by side has a reason to pick yours. If they do not, the roadmap was never the problem.

I switched to outcomes only about half a year ago, mostly for a different reason, which was that I kept missing my own dates and felt awful about it. Now every post is a thing that exists, a number attached to it and one thing I got wrong. It reads better, takes less time, and there is nothing in it for anyone to copy except work I have already done.

Write the Friday update. Skipping it after a copycat shows up tells everyone reading that you were rattled by them, which is a worse signal than anything on your roadmap page.