Ask HN: If someone else is "doing it", is that a reason not to compete?

Yes. If someone else is doing it, don't bother.

Does that sound right to you? No? Well... :)

Three points:

1) If someone else is doing it that's good, in fact preferable. You are probably not the only person to have had a given idea, ergo if someone else is making money at it you probably can too.

2) Focus on the building core of the product. Don't worry about the attendant features, just...distill your idea down to its barest essence and start with that. Forget scalability, fee structuring, user account management...just put all that stuff on a shelf for now. Get a proof of concept working. Have other people look at it. Float it to your friends here at HN.

3) Think about how much you need to make? You don't need to be "the next XXX" to have a lot of fun and make great money. A million in revenue isn't worth any of the company's you mentioned attention (well, maybe MySpace), but it's a big deal to a tiny company.

This book here mentions a lot of what I'm saying: http://www.amazon.com/Business-Software-Manager-Programmer-E...

It's well worth the money.

Competition is a good thing. It proves there is a market for the product. If the competition is big, they are doing part of your marketing for you, letting people know they have a problem that needs solving. You can also use their product as a way to position your own product. There are some markets that are saturated and difficult to stand out, but it sounds this may not be the case.

The only thing that worries me in your post is "But I am concerned about trying to convince investors of this." I've chased funding before and its not a fun position to be in. Better to boot strap and have total control. In most cases you are going to need a product, active customers and some revenue to get a foot in the door for investors and even then, the odds are not in your favor.

Facebook came after MySpace and Friendster, Google had entrenched competition. If investors don't get that, I wouldn't want them on my board.

Before starting I made a list of all my potential competitors. Then I spent some money getting industry data, and found out none of them actually had traction with bigger companies.

And then I changed products, twice, each time redefining who the competition was. BI? Recommendation engine? Advertising optimization platform? Recoset could end up as any of these, depending on customer validation.

Finally, every week there's a new potential competitor announced. I don't care: my focus isn't on winning against anyone else, it's making sure I have a viable business model.

Depends whether you think you can do it "better", for some segment of the market.

There's no point in competing if you're just going to do the same thing as the entrenched competitor, but worse. Why would someone use your product?

There's a big reason to compete if you can do what someone's already doing, but better. And it doesn't have to be better for everyone. It just has to be better for some population of existing users that are currently dissatisfied with their existing experience.