What I find interesting here is to evaluate exactly <i>how great</i> your idea was compared to that of your competitors.<p>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.<p>So maybe your idea wasn&#x27;t so great after all?<p>I find it very common to hear people say &quot;people made money off of my idea&quot;: that means people don&#x27;t consider market timing or marketing to be part of the idea. Isn&#x27;t that odd?<p>I guess that comes from &quot;ideas&quot; living on a spectrum from a vague &quot;AirBnB for X&quot; to a fully baked narrative that includes a very precise vision (not that that&#x27;s what ends up being executed in the end). You hear a lot of the former, very few of the latter.