While I was researching existing concepts of most popular apps I realized that most of them took existing concept and flipped it on its head. Maybe I'm wrong for some of them
Snapchat
Existing concept: uploaded images and photos stay online (forever)
Flipped: images and photos stay online shortly
Vine
Existing concept: videos are long
Flipped: videos should be short
Whatsapp
Existing concept: SMS are not free
Flipped: SMS are now free
Twitter
Existing concept: blogs/blogging should have large texts
Flipped: blogs/blogging can be short
Digg
Existing concept: News should be aggregated by journalists
Flipped: news can be aggregated and voted on by visitors
Tinder
Existing concept: dating online is opened for people to send messages to whoever, no matching
Flipped: you need to match in order to continue
These are of course most popular examples. Seems like all of them followed the same formula, probably unintentionally. Of course some of them were lucky, some had good marketing. What's your opinion on it?
Existing: The search engine ranks the pages based on some metric within the search engine.
Flipped: Other linking pages determine which pages have higher rank.
This is kind of an interesting way to think about things. But (almost) everything new that succeeded flipped something of the existing offerings. That is, "exactly the same" almost never takes over the market.
But it can still be an interesting way to think about things. Here's the existing order; what are you trying to flip? ("You" = "your offering/startup/idea".)