You Don't Have to be 100% Original... But You Should Improve Upon Ideas if You Aren't
One common misconception among people starting out in business is the belief that an idea must be completely original to be worth pursuing. This applies to the business model, design, user experience, support strategy, and even down to individual features. Before you bring out your pitchforks... hear me out. :)
While originality is great where possible, it’s not a necessity if you spot an opportunity to improve on an existing idea and solve a problem more effectively. Let me share an example from our budgeting app. One issue we’ve consistently heard from our user base is the need for better reports and graphs to show spending and progress over time. That feedback makes sense. We’ve learned that spending breakdowns (month by month) and net worth over time are two of the most critical features, so we’ll start there and iterate.
Creating a “net worth over time” feature is straightforward—a basic bar graph does the trick. However, spending breakdowns are a bit trickier. Should we use bar charts, stacked bars, pie charts, stacked lines? Where to begin?
The default answer often seems to be a pie chart, but when we looked at YNAB (a very popular budgeting tool similar to ours), we noticed they use a horizontal stacked bar chart. We liked that idea a lot, but we wondered: how can we make it even better?
While exploring further, we came across Monarch (another popular budgeting tool) and their implementation of a similar report. Monarch lists each category with a relative percentage bar chart spanning the width of the row. It’s incredibly intuitive and helpful for diving deeper into the data. Inspired by this, we decided to incorporate elements of that approach into our design.
The result? A combination of the best ideas from both tools, delivering what we believe is a more polished and effective experience than either method alone. But we think the ultimate verdict should come from the community.
What do you think? Is it morally wrong to take existing ideas and improve upon them, or is that just smart business and product design? Let me know!
This is a great point! You don't always have to reinvent the wheel, but it's essential to put your unique spin on things. Improving upon existing ideas shows creativity and a deeper understanding of the topic. Innovation often comes from building on what's already out there, adding your personal touch, and making it better, more efficient, or more relevant. It's all about evolution, not necessarily revolution!
Hey there,
very inspiring journey of creating a Solution to improve the Product for the customer experience.
I don't see a Problem to Analyze Products in the same category and crafting "the own beer" from the best Parts of the other Products.
You don't have to invent the wheel again. :)
I absolutely agree. Especially in saturated spaces. I think one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my product career and startup journey is that you don’t have to be original in everything… if something works well for a competitor implement it… if you can make it better, make it better… but as long as you have other differentiators sometimes parity is all you need. All about figuring out where you can do better relative to the market!
I agree. Especially on the last sentence:
"All about figuring out where you can do better relative to the market!"
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Most of the Time the Personal Touch keeps the difference in a Product,
in my opinion.
“morally wrong"? this is literally how progress works.
what you did isn’t stealing—it’s remixing. take the best ideas, improve them, and make them your own. that’s how every great product happens.
if you’re solving real problems for real people, originality is optional. execution is everything.
tl;dr: good artists copy, great artists ship. keep shipping.
This article beautifully emphasizes the value of improvement over originality. The insights are practical and inspiring for creators striving to refine ideas. Thank you, Noah and Kualia.com, for sharing this perspective!
Happy to share, and glad folks are finding value in the nonsense that comes out of my mouth (digitally at least) :)
Creating something 100% original is difficult, but starting from a specific scene as a point of entry, optimizing and expanding on it, can also lead to success.
Couldn't agree more. I think the notion of originality leads to "non-starter-syndrome" and stops a lot of brilliant people from ever diving into something new!
I completely agree with this point: in business, it's not necessary to come up with a completely original idea; the key is to solve a problem effectively and provide a better experience than what's already out there. As mentioned in the article, when designing the "spending breakdown" feature, borrowing from successful products like YNAB and Monarch, and then refining it based on your understanding of user needs, is a smart and practical strategy.
I believe that imitating and improving upon existing ideas is not "plagiarism" but rather innovation and refinement of a concept. Behind every successful business product, you can usually trace iterations and improvements on existing ideas. What's most important is listening to user feedback, understanding their needs, and then continuously optimizing to provide better solutions.
By combining the best elements of multiple existing products, you're creating a more intuitive and effective feature, and ultimately, the users benefit. So in my view, this approach is not just a smart business strategy but also the essence of good product design.
In conclusion, while originality is important, improving user experience by borrowing and refining existing ideas is often a more market-driven path.
The fact that your goal was to do something better than existing tools is the right approach. It's definitely not unethical either way, but even less so if you're putting your own spin on it.
I tend to agree, which might bother some in saying that outright copying certain aspects is sometimes okay. The reality is that in competitive spaces, sometimes just being at parity on price, price model, a certain feature, etc. is exactly what you need and nothing more!
Yeah definitely, and I think there's also a naive approach that a lot of laymen or early founders have where the mentality is like, "oh someone else is already doing that, so I can't do that", but like you mentioned, being at parity on most things, and then differentiating on a single value proposition can be enough.