Does a Business Idea Have to Be Unique?
Your startup idea isn't special. Dozens of people had it before you.
There’s this myth that your business idea needs to be unique. That if someone else has already done it, then you’re too late, the door has closed, and you might as well give up. It’s a myth that kills more startups before they even begin.
Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.
Pathao was not an original idea. We weren’t even the first motorcycle ride-sharing company in Bangladesh. There was a company called Share-A-Motorcycle that launched before us. They had a head start, the so-called “first-mover advantage.” But being first didn’t matter. What mattered was who executed better, who adapted faster, and who built trust with customers. On all three, we outperformed. And that’s why Pathao became a household name while Share-A-Motorcycle disappeared.
This pattern isn’t unique to us. Look at bKash, the crown jewel of Bangladesh’s fintech scene. Everyone thinks of it as a revolutionary idea, but it was modeled after M-Pesa, the mobile banking system that transformed Africa. The brilliance wasn’t in dreaming up something no one had ever seen before, it was in localizing the model, executing at scale, and building consumer trust in a Bangladeshi context.
Or take ShopUp, one of the most successful startups to come out of Dhaka. Their model is inspired by Udaan in India, a B2B platform for small retailers. ShopUp didn’t pretend to invent the category, they borrowed a proven playbook and adapted it to the needs of Bangladesh’s fragmented retail ecosystem. That’s what made them work.
The Idea Trap
The obsession with uniqueness is what I call the idea trap. Founders convince themselves that unless they stumble on something the world has never seen, they’re not entrepreneurs. They guard their “billion-dollar idea” like it is treasure, pitching it only in whispers, terrified someone will steal it. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: if your idea is so fragile that someone else can kill it just by hearing it, then it was never worth much in the first place.
Unique ideas are, in fact, more likely to fail. Because if nobody is doing it anywhere in the world, chances are the market doesn’t exist yet, or the timing isn’t right, or the problem just isn’t painful enough for people to pay for a solution. The graveyard of startups is littered with “unique” ideas that sounded good in theory but never crossed over into reality.
Meanwhile, founders who looked at what was working elsewhere and localized it have a much higher success rate. Rocket Internet built an empire copying successful Western startups and launching them in developing markets. Lazada was basically Amazon for Southeast Asia. Foodpanda was modeled on Grubhub. Ola in India was “Uber for India.” And they all became giants.
Execution Eats Originality for Breakfast
What makes or breaks a business is not whether you were the first to dream it up, but whether you can execute it better, faster, and smarter than anyone else.
When we launched Pathao rides, we weren’t pitching Dhaka something unheard of. Uber was already a global giant. Grab was dominating Southeast Asia. Gojek had already become indispensable in Indonesia. What we did was recognize that Dhaka’s roads, Dhaka’s traffic, and Dhaka’s people needed something local. We built for this city, not for Silicon Valley. That was our advantage.
Execution means obsessing over the small things. Recruiting drivers one by one when no one trusted the platform yet. Convincing skeptical students at BRAC University to take the first rides. Building manual Facebook groups before we even had a functioning app. And then scaling that chaos into something systematic. None of that required a unique idea, it required relentless follow-through.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Some of the world’s greatest companies were not originals in the pure sense.
Google wasn’t the first search engine, there was AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo. They just built a better algorithm and executed relentlessly.
Facebook wasn’t the first social network, Friendster and MySpace came before. Zuckerberg didn’t invent the category; he perfected it.
Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, the smartphone, or the tablet. They simply reimagined the user experience so well that competitors became irrelevant.
The pattern is clear: success belongs to the one who adapts and executes better, not necessarily the one who dreams first.
Localize, Don’t Idolize
The smarter path, especially in emerging markets, is to look at what works elsewhere and localize it ruthlessly. Dhaka is not Jakarta. Dhaka is not Silicon Valley. You cannot just copy-paste. You need to tweak the model until it bends to your reality.
Pathao’s early courier pivot is a perfect example. We thought people wanted instant delivery, like Postmates in the U.S. But the real need was reliability and cash-on-delivery for Facebook sellers. That was the pain point, not speed. Once we saw that, we shifted, and suddenly the model worked.
The Real Test
So the next time you catch yourself saying, “But someone’s already doing it,” stop. The real question isn’t whether the idea is unique, it’s whether you can execute it better, adapt it faster, and localize it smarter than anyone else.
Because at the end of the day, ideas don’t move markets. Execution does.