As a part of our business, we continuously evaluate software and internet based business ideas together with our potential clients. Such evaluations do not only cover the software development cost aspect, but we also provide guidance and analysis on business profitability for our clients to decide to proceed or not with their ideas.

One common approach we observe in this respect is the following: Our clients compulsively concentrate on and spend too much time for trying to find a very unique and completely new business idea . These efforts, more often than none, end up with frustration when they find out that competitors already exist for the idea they had in their mind.

We, on the other hand, believe that existence of competitors is not a reason alone to give up pursuing a software business.

There are tons of examples from internet and other software businesses in favor of our approach. Take, for instance, Google as a very striking example – when today’s by far number one has been launched, many other search engines that we can even hardly remember today existed such as Yahoo, AltaVista, Web Crawler, Lycos, Infoseek, Magellan and more.

While it is a very tempting idea to become the next inventor of the century by coming up with something like Facebook or Twitter, one should keep at least the following two facts in mind when considering to start a new software business:

• There may be more than a few worldwide success stories in software and internet industry about which everybody is aware, but there are thousands if not millions of failure stories which nobody even hear about.  In this sense, the chances of coming up with a brand new idea and reaching successes is somewhere in the proximity of the probability of winning the jackpot.

• Finding a brand new business idea without any competitors may be something to be more frightened of, than deciding to become a new player in an area where competition exists. Competition at the same time shows that there is a demand, while, in today’s internet age, there may be good reasons why a particular business does not exist and being the first player could be much more riskier than perceived.