If you take a look at our venture builder, (https://fail.vc) you'll that we have gone from 0 to 1 successfully five times so far. One of the most counter-intuitive things for us so far is that competition actually plays a very little part in that. Competition is much celebrated and admired but we've found that if your goal is 0 to 1, your energy is put to better use when you look away from the competition.

There are 3 main reasons:

You need to be extremely creative when going from 0 to 1.

In this scenario, you're usually really trying to come up with an idea that hasn't really been done before. This requires a great deal of creativity from you. If you look at the competition to try and figure out best practices, you might accidentally box yourself into a local maximum.

Competition drains your resources.

Competition is great for customers and can create enormous value; but for businesses, it can be a huge drain on your resources to stay competitive. Preferably, you'd focus your resources on providing a great customer experience instead. A great example is the train networks in the United States; they created a tremendous amount of value but the competition basically drove them out of business.

The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for or know that they want.

If you're going from 0 to 1 you'll need to use your own imagination about what's possible. If you don't know that something even exists - how would you even be able to know that's what you want? Competition is only useful as a reference for things that already exist and not usually for things that are built from scratch.