[comatose_kid]

not sure if thinking of the solution ('advancing the state-of-the-art) is appropriate yet. Two questions to ask yourself:

1)how well do you understand your customers (are you your customer)? Have you talked to at least 10-20 potential customers to understand what their big problems are?

2) Why do you believe that 'advancing the state-of-the-art' is needed to solve a meaningful problem? Maybe there's an easier problem you can solve for them, use the opportunity to learn and iterate.

[riyakhanna1983]

How do I prove better value compared to the competition w/o actually building something that is indeed better?

[quickthrower2]

Well you might not need to. For example I use both paid github and paid npm. Npm doesn’t offer all the features github does but it does do one thing better (well for now... github are copying them)