You Don't Have to be 100%Original... But You Should Improve Upon Ideas if You Aren't

One common misconception among people starting out in business is the belief that an idea must be completely original to be worth pursuing. This applies to the business model, design, user experience, support strategy, and even down to individual features. Before you bring out your pitchforks... hear me out. :)

While originality is great where possible, it’s not a necessity if you spot an opportunity to improve on an existing idea and solve a problem more effectively. Let me share an example from our budgeting app. One issue we’ve consistently heard from our user base is the need for better reports and graphs to show spending and progress over time. That feedback makes sense. We’ve learned that spending breakdowns (month by month) and net worth over time are two of the most critical features, so we’ll start there and iterate.

Creating a “net worth over time” feature is straightforward—a basic bar graph does the trick. However, spending breakdowns are a bit trickier. Should we use bar charts, stacked bars, pie charts, stacked lines? Where to begin?

The default answer often seems to be a pie chart, but when we looked at YNAB (a very popular budgeting tool similar to ours), we noticed they use a horizontal stacked bar chart. We liked that idea a lot, but we wondered: how can we make it even better?

While exploring further, we came across Monarch (another popular budgeting tool) and their implementation of a similar report. Monarch lists each category with a relative percentage bar chart spanning the width of the row. It’s incredibly intuitive and helpful for diving deeper into the data. Inspired by this, we decided to incorporate elements of that approach into our design.

The result? A combination of the best ideas from both tools, delivering what we believe is a more polished and effective experience than either method alone. But we think the ultimate verdict should come from the community.

What do you think? Is it morally wrong to take existing ideas and improve upon them, or is that just smart business and product design? Let me know!