Almost 80% startups fail in the first year, and 95% of total startups fail within 3 years of starting and it's alright. The core of any business is still 'sales'. A good idea with no sales can still flop, there are many startups which were started in the 2000-2010 time frame, they flopped then because the ecosystem did not exist (mobile payments and related ecosystem and public approval), the same kind of startups are becoming famous now.
Those who simply want a profitable business should look into setting a turnkey business based on one of the existing business models, no need to reinvent the wheel. A friend of mine had some money, he simply started a hosting company, whenever his friends ask him "what's so special about it?" he says "nothing, we are a normal web hosting company and we have customers and are profitable", which is more than one can say for the fancy apps that his friends are trying to build to 'revolutionize' the universe. All successful startups have customers first, the app comes later. In fact, the apps were built only to take off some of the work load that the business was receiving. A lot of the ERP apps were made as internal apps to manage clients, even Quora was made as an internal Q and A system for engineers to talk among themselves and create an FAQ, only later did they start a new company out of it.
Look at how Directi/CodeChef grew in the highly saturated marketplace of competitive programming. What's so unique? one could say it's just a forum for competitive programmers, there is no buzz word to market it, still they grew. If this idea was presented to someone today they would say, there are so many programming forums, blogs, online tutorials, Coursera/Elitmus/EdX why do we need one more? but they made it, and it is successful. Same with WebEngage. It deals with analytics reporting just like Google Analytics, no buzzword. Still they are successful and profitable. I think our resident startup guy
@Bangalorean will have more wisdom to share.
In a saturated marketplace, getting customers itself is an innovation. But because of the way the 'idea of innovation' has been fed to us just like the 'idea of India', we are unable to think beyond the template of fancy applications that the news channels presents to us as an 'innovation'. We've all heard about those news which come out every month 'IItian makes nuclear power from his urine' 'IItian makes food from garbage' 'IItian eats shit and shits gold' type of silly news articles. The real innovation is happening elsewhere, but the news media is too stupid to recognize it.
Kids today want to make the app first, so that they can call themselves as the CEO of that app while taking pocket money from their father to buy vada paav. I know people who are running out of small apartments, have customers, are making profit, and they haven't even registered a domain or made a fancy app. I know someone who made some type of cooking machine, it was installed in Akshay Patra's kitchen, it provides food to lakhs of kids daily, and the guy got paid to implement the solution. Where as 80% of kids are still busy trying to build the next Facebook. Tumse na ho payega beta.