I have a profitable startup started fromn scratch with no investment in a competetive, but relatively stale in terms of innovation, industry. We are a tiny player competing for business with plenty of big guys with massive budgets. We're not even close to being able to compete on advertising or marketing for example.

What we have done now though is be pretty innovative and developed a unique service that will make people's lives who use these services that little bit better... a lot better in fact.

We've been able to build this service (and it is great!), but to be honest I am scared of launching it because:

1. We simply dont have a budget for marketing or or contacts for doing a big launch.

2. Our service is pretty innovative, but it wouldn't take too much to copy.

3. We're worried we will launch, the big guys monitoring the industry will see the product, launch their own in a few months and drown us out with their massive marketing budgets.

I guess the question is, how can we protect our product or service and avoid the above scenario?

Thanks