"All this has happened before. All this will happen again" -- Pythia, BSG. The first thing I do is research the daylights out of every competitive product I c

"All this has happened before. All this will happen again" -- Pythia, BSG. The first thing I do is research the daylights out of every competitive product I can find and compile a super set of features of all of them, noting pricing, positioning, messaging, etc. Then I circle the features that matter to me and I add my own secret sauce features. Then I turn the computer off and start sketching. Sketching isn't the act of coding or even designing. It's the act of thinking. Look at Leonardo's sketches -- particularly the ones of the human body. http://www.drawingsofleonardo.org http://www.drawingsofleonardo.org He isn't documenting in so much as he's working out what he thinks about how something will work, not just on the outside but on the inside as well. This is particularly true for his anatomy sketches. IMHO he would have been an awesome software designer. I believe that coding is the art of thinking clearly. Lack of clarity in what you're building almost always results in bad code, the kind that no amount of tweeking can fix. IMHO the absolute best prototyping tool out there is graph paper and pencil. Personally I like the marbled notebooks because they can take a beating and you can write on them reclining. Once you've got all the screens of your site drawn out and even some copy written in the margins then you can turn the computer back on and revisit each of those competitive sites and see if your idea still hunts. If it still does then start coding.