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

I've long been baffled as to why what I'm building doesn't already exist. Sure it's tough to actually design-and-make, but it's basically a holy grail of computing that a ton of people have, I think, generally wanted since long before I was born.

The weird thing is that I often do find people working on similar things. Sometimes they're historical projects I'll find a Wikipedia article on, or sometimes they're posted here on HackerNews.

Every time I see one, I think, "Wow! That's a lot like what I'm doing! How is this not a bigger thing?!". The initial surprise used to last a while as I started to dig, but further explanation tended to reveal that things weren't as they appeared.

For an analogy, say that everyone's still using horse-drawn carriages, not cars, to get around. Then, you want to invent a car. Then, you see what looks a lot like a car in someone's lab or in a museum. Then it's like, woah!, right? I mean, if someone already made a car, why are people still using horse-drawn carriages?

So then I'd look into the car and see that it doesn't actually have an engine inside. Or maybe it's got like a major piece of an engine, but still 80% missing.

Anyway, back to the thread's topic...

If you're building something that already exists, how sure are you that the thing that you think is a preexisting implementation actually does what you want your thing to do?

And maybe it does, and maybe your thing's a replication effort. But, my experience has been that things that look the same are off. That I'd see something that I'd think to be a car, and then mistakenly assume that surely it must contain an engine, only to later find out it doesn't.

I think it will help if you know why what you're going to build is going to be better than what exists. Like Google knew its search will be better, like Zoom knows its conf is better than WebEx.

Apple is the quintessential example of "take a sad song, and make it better".

For sure. I have concepts written down for things like a social network where the user retains ownership of their data and advertisers can offer them money for access to it. There are partial concepts out there like this but the biggest issue preventing me from creating a prototype is simply that I don't think I have the time to nurture a social network into being (which is probably harder than creating the thing). You need people on it to gain other people, a real chick and egg problem.

I still want to build the prototype. But, in trying to be realistic, I don't think it'll become a business or even popular.

It depends whether you're building something for the utility of it or to make money.

You can do the latter in a crowded market as you said, but often if you think you would like to build something for yourself, which is often the best way to build a product, then it's certainly possible to be satisfied with something that already exists.

If it's "exactly the same thing", I personally wouldn't do it. It doesn't have to be something so significantly different, but it has to be a solution to some real pain points that persist on the existing solution.

On his book "From 0 to 1", Peter Thiel goes even more extreme. For him, if something isn't 10x better then the alternative solution, he wouldn't do it.

Of course, all the above doesn't apply if your goal of building it is for learning-purposes or just for fun.