Ten years at StartNet, several hundred founders and MSMEs, and one pattern that kept appearing with an almost irritating regularity: almost nobody who succeeded started from a blank page.
This is not the story anyone wants to tell afterwards. Afterwards it is a story about vision. At the time it was almost always a story about someone who found a model that worked elsewhere, understood it properly, and adapted it to a market that model had never been built for.
The founders who insisted on total originality were, disproportionately, the ones who ran out of money — not because originality is bad, but because they paid for it at the wrong point in the sequence.
Copy. Find a model that has already been proven, in another market, another segment or another decade. Then study it properly, which is a tear-down and a feature map, not a screenshot and an opinion. The gap between what a product does and what its marketing says it does is usually where the opportunity is hiding.
Customize. This is where entries actually die, and they die on unglamorous things. Language, and specifically register — not translation, register. Payment behaviour and credit expectations. Logistics and the last mile. Regulation. Culture. Each one of those has killed an entry that got the other four right.
Innovate. On top of the customised base, where innovation is finally cheap because the foundation is already de-risked. You can afford to be wrong here. You could not afford to be wrong three steps ago.
Most entry failures are sequence failures. Teams innovate first — on a foundation nobody has proven, in a market they have not localised for — and then spend the runway discovering, expensively and one at a time, the things a tear-down would have told them in week one.
CoirGarden did ₹8 crore in online sales in under two years applying this. [B]Grade B · Claimedpending sight of the underlying sales record.As at 26 August 2026 That is when I stopped calling it an observation and started calling it a framework.
There is one more thing worth saying, because it comes up in every workshop. People hear "copy" and think it means "do not be ambitious." It means the opposite. Starting from what already worked is what lets the ambition survive to the part where originality actually pays.