Analyse competition well...

When you think of a need of a particular set of users, it is important to analyse how those users are managing now. We should assess all companies who are currently satisfying or come close to satisfying the need and analyse how we intend to offer something different and incremental to their products. This step is extremely crucial as at times, we tend to not consider all the competitors and this may result in us making a product which is similar to one existing now and hence having no sustainable advantage going forward.

This happened to me in Beveragewala. We were creating an 'Amazon for Beverages' without realising till very late that Amazon had also started selling beverages :(. At that point, we had already burnt a lot of money and had no significant competitive edge and had to close down.