We all have an idea in for an app, website or business. But have you really looked at the competitive landscape and taken a look at who is out there. Has any other website or app accomplished what your vision entails? Have you really though about what it is that your service will provide? If you think about it most ideas have been executed already but just have not been refined to an elegant process that majority of the population will engage. For instance FTP/SFTP has been around for years its versatile, permission based, creates logs, secure under SSL, fast and reliable. But would your uncle Joe use FTP? Would your uncle Joe use Dropbox? Well most likely yes, as Dropbox has become the de facto in file sharing providing an intuitive common user experience that windows and mac users feel at home with. It provides all the features of FTP but is elegant in design and usability.  This is a good example of taking an existing idea and making a better light bulb. 

Having a good competitive benchmark analysis means having a team of software developers, user experience experts, start up visionary’s and digital marketing experts to see platforms that are similar to your process but might be something totally different. For instance if your idea was to create a website to manage concerts you might search Google for cloud based concert management software which is a good start. But an experience user experience expert can see this is quite similar to project management software. By looking closely at the project management software its workflow, experience you can pull some great aspects into your vision or start up.