Ask HN: Are you put off building something because it already exists?

Big market, check. Validated demand, check. Product or service exists, uh-oh.

I set out to build a reverse address book. Instead of updating your address book with changes from everyone else, you update your own details and it pushes to everyone else. Turns out someone beat me to it and my inspiration evaporated.

Zoom is a recent and great example of competing in a crowded market and winning. For you builders/founders out there, are you on a never ending quest to find something new/unique or do you prefer another quality in your idea to start a project?

It depends on the size of the total addressable market. If the size of your target market is big, even if there are bigger established players, there is always a chance for a small, nimble product to carve out a niche. Established players often head upmarket (especially if they are VC funded). This often gives an opening for a new entrant to capture some of the SMB market share.

An example closer to me: the search engine market is dominated by Elasticsearch, which is open source, extremely popular and is now even a public company. However, I decided to work on a small project called Typesense (https://github.com/typesense/typesense) to try and carve out a niche (and perhaps charge for it later).

I decided to take a dive simply because of the size of the market -- search is required in almost every SaaS application, and there are plenty of downsides to ES that can be addressed with a nimble, alternative search engine. And that's what I am doing :)

Mine is mostly a mental problem, I feel like my product will never be good enough compared to others. Even right now, I'm working on a simple website for a specific niche, but there's already another website that does exactly the same thing. I feel like people will just think I copied there idea, or that they might have better content than me. It's always been an issue for me, and because of it, I've never been able to finish anything.

Not really; even if it already exist it may be different from what I want in various ways, so, I can make up a new one. (In the case of FOSS, sometimes it is suitable to modify an existing one, although also sometimes not.)

> there's already another website that does exactly the same thing

I don't think there's anything wrong with this per se, but you still need something to set yours apart. For example, if the features are identical, then the price can be different. If the price is the same, then you can edge them out with features or service or get ready, experience.

Amazon won us over with price, but now there are often other places with lower online prices (often walmart.com) but we tend to use amazon more because the experience is good (although they're killing that now too, but that's another discussion).