The fallacy you're describing, and it's something that far too many startups do, falls under the banner of "cargo cult behaviour". It was first described by Richard Feynman, while talking about science, but the principle applies to people who merely mimic behaviour and expect the same outcome regardless of what they're doing.
"In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land." [1]
Believing you're building a billion dollar business because you're nationally doing the same things as someone who has built a billion dollar business before you is all too common.
"In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land." [1]
Believing you're building a billion dollar business because you're nationally doing the same things as someone who has built a billion dollar business before you is all too common.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science