You’ve shot so far past not copying the competition that you’re not aware of them at all
Disproof
Being demonstrably the only company solving a problem as evidenced by the problem only being solved through duct-tape and excel spreadsheets
Consequences
At best: wasting time re-inventing wheels when you could be working on the internal combustion engine in a horse-and-buggy world
At worst: missing a non-product reason why your competitor has an unfair advantage and will be able to keep its moat. This can lead to an extremely valuable, operationalised product that doesn’t have a hope in hell of succeeding
Causes
Can genuinely happen due to everyone being too busy making the thing to look around
The hubris of exceptionalism: an honest belief you have no competition - there are very few ‘categories of one’ despite what you’ll hear on a pitch day. Beware Macduff.
Problems as they are currently being solved functionally define who is your competitor or not, not whether anyone else is using crypto to do something a database could do perfectly well
Approaches
Compare problems to problems not solutions to solutions. News of a funding round or two usually helps to snap you out of it
It is also worth studying how your competitors have positioned and operationalised their products, and profiting from their mistakes