A better Twitter? I've never heard those kind of sentences being thrown around before. Shut up and take my money... In all seriousness though, you can build something better than Twitter but it's the Google problem all over again: the market is cornered and unless you've got big pockets like Facebook or Apple, you've got no chance of going toe-to-toe with the big guys like Twitter.
Maybe a crowd-funding drive upfront is actually a good action in that case. If it succeeds, you have roughly ~50000 seed users that have a vested interest in seeing your product succeed.
