What to do about competition when you FIRST have an idea for your startup

FULL POST IS IN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP AFTER YOU HAVE SPOKEN TO TEN CUSTOMERS IN THE MILVALCHAL - a contest we have been running where we offer $5,000 in investment and resources at a $1,000,000 automatic valuation for any team in the world who submits 100 customer interviews in 50 days. 



Steve brought up the the idea of competition in the group -- my response is as follows... it is just my opinion at the moment but we are keeping data to prove all of our own theories about what to focus on and when...

"thanks for the comments Steve Estes the idea of this group is to get PRIMARY information - as early and as often as possible... secondary information can be used to CREATE hypotheses and if someone decides they do not even want to test something because they have found DIRECTLY FROM A USER THAT THEY TALKED TO that there is no problem because it is being solved sufficiently by someone else, fine... but we are trying to avoid the top down "friendster is doing it, apple is doing it, chegg did that" and focusing instead on finding UNIQUE problems to solve for SPECIFIC people then growing from there... if competition is sufficiently solving the problem, the entrepreneurs will see this indication early on in the first 100 interviews, and certainly in initial customer action experiments - "