Sometimes the specifics of the idea can be important though. For example, take Google: lets use hyperlink data to rank websites

What's your idea?

And their market share in the developed world isn't even in first place, and they're not even growing significantly faster than MySpace there.

Also, Google makes more per pageview by far than their 2nd place competitor, Facebook makes substantially less than MySpace. If anything in the social networking wars, MySpace is Google.

If you are working on a totally new idea, it means you are trying to explore a totally new market. And, thing tends to become even worse if your web app are trying to shape new habits among people.

And, if I were you, instead of spending time working on the research, I would rather spend the time start working on the idea. You may already a prototype right now if you started working on it the last couple weeks.

But, I do not mean that research is bad. But, I will try to keep the research time as short as possible. And, I agree with aneesh, try to keep your idea as specific as possible.

Besides, I assume that you are working on your idea alone, so, it is always good to target a niche market.

Instead, its often better to just take something familiar and make it better or adapt it for a certain niche. Make an ipod, not a segway.

I think that the strongest ideas are never really original, they are just better implementations of the existing ones.

There are always a million reasons to not go through with something. If you're excited about the idea, and if you're pretty sure you can turn it into something profitable there's no reason not to go ahead.

We used it as a basis for solving disagreements. Whenever we couldn't agree or decide what to do, we just say "what is our competitor doing?" It isn't about copying per se, it's about keeping momentum and getting past decision problems.

the recent t-mobile offer for customers also proves this: its the same phone call but just with a different operator whom you'll hate when tmobile gives such offers :)

Ideally you do a startup where other companies are doing something badly, their users hate them, and they still make money.

Try to figure our what the core perspective of the other app is; perhaps it is subtly different from your vision - assess whether you believe your core concept is "better" than theirs.

It is very rarely the unique idea that wins. It's the implementation and execution.

Innovation in the way you will get traffic is one of the ways to distinguish yourself. If you are a paid service, consider integrating better commission/affiliate systems. They work.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365962

Also, consider that if that German hadn't invented the automobile, Ford still would have. i.e. Ford wasn't inspired by that German, because he was already working on an automobile. His autobiography is very good: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/hnfrd10.txt*

Yes. It's not the "same" precise idea - maybe, the same concept. And you'll see more as you go along:

I find my creativity is very local. I have to be at a new vantage point, to see new things. That is, to have a prototype, to play with it, to hear what problems people have - just to know more.

My experience: I began with one concept that seemed really cool to me, I did a little research and saw things vaguely similar, but they didn't get "my" idea (fortunately for me, I didn't find the several attempts that did get my idea). But as I began executing, I hit a roadblock - something that really spoiled my idea, made it impossible to realize the cool vision properly. I asked around, dejectedly, and someone suggested I look at how an unrelated project solved that particular problem - I did that and found the solution! But then bizarre twist 1: through doing this, I came to realize that the "unrelated project" was really doing exactly the same thing as me - just in a different sense. I would not have seen this connection (and did not) until I was intimidate with the details (i.e. was at a new vantage point). Bizarre twist 2: the title of my project perfectly described both my old conception and my new conception, although I could not see this ambiguity til after the journey.

Take the journey. You are surrounded by opportunities you cannot see.

Also: "What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?" http://ycombinator.com/app.txt (is there access to a more recent application form?)

Seriously, unless the other folks are literally owning the market, keep chasing it. Most markets have plenty of room for multiple successful players.

Incredibly, emphatically, overwhelmingly unimportant. In fact, I would say that if your idea was truly original, that would be extremely worrying from a business standpoint.

In fact, I wrote an article on that topic:

http://inter-sections.net/2008/08/26/bad-bloggers-copy-great...

Your idea doesn't need to be original, but your execution of it needs to be better. In at least some small way that will gain you customers, it needs to be better on day 1.

Some argue that being the 5th or 6th entrant into a market is optimal. The first few entrants make all the mistakes with product development and marketing in the early months. They then make changes after learning from the mistakes they have made over time, and you benefit from their painful trial and error.

Originality goes way beyond product ideas though. If you truly want to build a business, you have to create a company behind the product. That consists of many, many systems, a founding team with business instincts and vision, and the panache to bring ideas to life and build a company culture with flair. Everything has to be built from scratch. For my company, I see the products as one small part of who we are and what we do. Zappos calls themselves a customer-service company that just happens to sell shoes. If the shoe market goes to hell one day then they can take the business system they have built and pursue other markets. The value is in systems and top talent to run the systems, not inventions. Ideas are a dime-a-dozen, and we all have too many interesting ideas that we can't get to for lack of time. Systematic, consistent execution will make you that million bucks. If you have made it this far in the post, I highly recommend Michael Gerber's book called "the E-myth". It addresses why most small businesses do not succeed, and it has probably been the most valuable knowledge I have ever acquired. Also, check out sequoia capital's idea page, and see if your idea passes their test.

Now go out and execute!

Take your best idea, run with it, and make everything up as you go along.

is defined as having a unique spin on a product/service with a proven market, stunning marketing materials, and silver-tongued salesmanship

There are no shortage of ideas, and no shortage of businesses to build if you have the ideas. If the company/market you are looking at has a good implementation with market penetration and barriers to entry, and if you can't SIGNIFICANTLY make a difference, then maybe keep looking. Take a read of Rick Segal's current post (and my comment there). http://ricksegal.typepad.com/pmv/2008/11/features-of-the-wor...

So, your final sentence says it all... go develop, you'll learn a ton going through that process and maybe find more ways to differentiate and improve on the market.

Don't forget to let us know when you launch.

But I am stuck in a similar situation. The worse part is to get the users of the competitor's service switch to mine. Coz the competitor has a huge chunk of data that's of value to the user. How do i urge the users to switch when the competitor doesn't have an API to access the user's data? If he had it then i could've built an app to import user data from the competitor's service.

The value of any idea is the execution of that idea. In the world of software its the implementation of that idea. If your competitor has done a kick ass job implementing the idea you thought of and you really don't think you could do a much better job, I would probably look for other ideas that you feel you could do better.

Another thing to look at is the capability, velocity, and momentum of the competitors idea; you may be able to out maneuver them if it took them a long time to get to the point they did and they suck at software development. If they are kicking ass and getting funding to add more resources and move faster, this could make your life harder.

That said, don't do a feature-by-feature copy of the competition. That adds absolutely no value to the world and you're going to have a hell of a time escaping their shadow. Plus it would make you a slimy person its just really bad PR.

One of our competitors is copying us feature-by-feature and it actually puts us to an advantage because they don't understand why we did what we did and our software development delivery is much faster and higher quality than theirs.

How do we know this? Just by looking at their web page source. They have all of this test javascript code and fixtures mixed in with their production javascript, they use tables to control their page formatting, left /phpinfo.php on their root web server, use Dreamweaver to code their PHP and image roll-overs, and push everything out via FTP on port 21. Who the hell does that? On top of that they haven't delivered any new features in the past 4 months.

At the end of the day, very rarely are ideas original. You're better off focusing on the execution of an idea and out-delivering the competition.

If you sweat harder and sweat smarter than the other guy, you'll clean house.

You will never think of something totally unique. Just do it first, better, or cheaper.