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I would recommend looking at Steve Reich's early pieces. That sort of sums up the early phase of minimalism pretty well. 20 minute long repetitions with only slight variations (Come out and It's gonna rain, piano phase, etc.)
Reich's work, if you listen from the oldest of his pieces to the newest, or until Caves, or until Different Trains you can clearly see the progression in techniques. The repetition element is used in many different ways later on, unlike Glass, Reich varies his style lots.
What is interesting about Reich and Glass is both have a very specific harmonic constellation they use all the time. It all returns to specific harmonic sequences, despite what the piece is. I think that's also something to consider, as an overall aesthetic thing.
There are other people, such as Yann Tiersen (Amelie, Good Bye Lenin OSTs) who use a little bit from the early phase and the later phase. Again, Tiersen's got a very defined harmonic constellation in all of his music that he always returns to, or allures.
In general, I'd say that one of the things you ought to do is grab all what is considered "minimalist" and shoot for what you actually like best, since the term is extremely broad. There are no.. uh... "interval" rules or such, and as far as I'm concerned you can make atonal minimalist music. One of the reasons for something like Reich's piano phase being tonal is probably because after so much repetitions tonality starts to sound abstract on its own. Like, it stops sounding like a chord progression and it begins sounding like background noise. Or at least that's one of the things the effect is known to cause.
So, yeah. It's a fun style, but it's really broad in definition.
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