Don't be afraid of your competitors

Well written article. Thanks for sharing.

The service that we are building is not ground breaking or unique, but definitely a market validated one. My friend (now my partner as well) & I decided on one particular idea that is not unique, but a market validated one. We used to debate about several ideas while pursuing our day jobs for the last couple of years, wrote business plans and were searching for THAT unique idea that we should pursue.

Thanks to HN community, reading various articles on these subjects cleared lots of things for us. I now understand it is not necessary that the idea needs to be unique that nobody else has ever solved. (Thanks to patio11 for his excellent blog posts. Thanks! :-))

There is always scope of not just one or two but several companies to thrive and solve customer's problems. We can always take a standard market validated solution, innovate & make life better for those specific niches around us. Like it is always iterated by various folks here in HN, it is execution that matters.

In my case, I think starting with the market validated idea is the best approach to get started and I could pursue my unique ideas using this as a platform. Plus it helps that I have a greater chance of bootstrapping it all without taking external funding (not that external funding is bad, just that you have the freedom to execute as per your plan).

just found some similar discussion on Quora FYI.

Always Assume Competition: http://www.quora.com/Babak-Nivi/Always-assume-competition

I think within the context of globalization you may want to do http://www.netmba.com/strategy/pest/