Just sayin.. :)
Curious :)
Not saying those things aren't useful, but nothing beats being your own customer. Since I'm not a student anymore and still work on Quizlet full-time, it's super important for me and the whole team to have exposure to our users' experience and mindset. So to hack it, we started a Spanish class at the office so we'd have to use the product. We've also been going on field-trips to various middle- and high-school classrooms around the bay area about once a week.
One deliberate competitive advantage is that we're a free, ad-supported site. Most education products go for a subscription model, and that requires enterprise sales (selling to districts, blech) and fundamentally limits the number of people who will use and enjoy your product.
The ad model only works when you have scale (which we do). If we had been in a position where we needed to make money quickly, we wouldn't have grown into the size and scope we have now.
Are you saying that the number of existing quiz/flashcard sites would create a research result that would discourage attempting another one? It seems like you knew while you were building Quizlet that you had something different in mind, so the only unknown was whether people would use it en masse. As it turns out, you were right, but, and this is a sincere question, was this vision or luck?
Isn't it more accurate to say that the art lies in knowing what questions to ask the oracle, and how to ask those questions, rather than ignoring the value of prophecy?
All this was when I was 15, and I wasn't thinking about things in terms of startups and competition and so on. It's certainly possible that another way it would have happened was researching the competitive landscape and deciding I could do it better.
You've been fortunate that you could utilise a tangible and working prototype to gain customer insight. Congrats on building this into a business.
Other approaches (like lean) encourage you to first evaluate your idea/concept before building a prototype. When a concept has some good potential then going straight to prototype can work. Its having this confidence that has worked for you.
Some of these competitive advantages do seem to serendipitously fall out of helping people after all: making a better product for them; letting them know about it.
Perhaps these naturally fall out of trying to solve a problem or address a need (especialy "being your own customer" with that problem/need). There's always ways to improve it, because most needs/problems are never perfectly solved - which is good for competitive advantage. I'm in the opposite place, of developing a solution - it's beginning to seem like a fundamentally difficult way to go.