What I find interesting here is to evaluate exactly how great your idea was compared to that of your competitors.

It sounds like in your case, what made the idea good was not so much the product itself, but applying it to the right niche (product-market fit in modern startup parlance), possibly at the right time.

So maybe your idea wasn't so great after all?

I find it very common to hear people say "people made money off of my idea": that means people don't consider market timing or marketing to be part of the idea. Isn't that odd?

I guess that comes from "ideas" living on a spectrum from a vague "AirBnB for X" to a fully baked narrative that includes a very precise vision (not that that's what ends up being executed in the end). You hear a lot of the former, very few of the latter.