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

Competition is the fun part! Once you see existing products/services, you can use them as a proxy to validate some aspects of your idea, but also study from them to see what they're lacking:

- Perhaps the service isn't able to meet 100% of the user needs, maybe because some users jumped onto that product because it was the closest (but not perfect) solution to their problem. Or maybe the company grew too big and lost focus/decided to ignore the needs of a few because they moved up.

- What about the non-technical parts of the product/service? Sometimes you can differentiate by user experience (the note-taking app "Notion" is a really good example of this, and totally swept me up. Kudos to their team!).

My favorite example of this is jet.com - who in their right mind would compete directly with Amazon on Amazon’s home turf? Well, it turns out it only looked like the same turf (“e-commerce”), but that’s the catch. Differentiation is subtle yet powerful, and Jet.com went for slower, bulk commodities, with a different pricing approach. Markets are, apparently, full of fickle niches!

Exactly this, the market is validated. Can you find an opening? The game changes more to marketing.

Here's the recommendation I give to students when they ask me this question (it's a common one!):

You come up with a brilliant idea, you obsess over it, you Google some info, and on your screen lies your idea, being done by someone else, for the last two years. You’re all too familiar with that sinking feeling in your stomach that follows. You abandon the idea almost immediately after all that excitement and ideation.

First (as already mentioned), existing solutions prove your idea — their existence proves that you’re trying to solve a real problem that people might pay to have solved. And it proves that you’re heading in a direction that makes sense to others, too.

Second, and this is the biggie: The moment you see someone else’s solution, you mar and limit your ideas. It suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to think outside the box because before, you were exploring totally new territory. Your mind was pioneering in a frontier that had no paths. But now, you’ve seen someone else’s path. It becomes much harder to see any other potential paths. It becomes much harder to be freely creative.

Next time you come up with that great idea, don’t Google it for a week. Let your mind fester on the idea, allow it to grow like many branches from a trunk. Jot down all of the tangentially related but equally exciting ideas that inevitably follow. Allow your mind to take the idea far into new places. No, you won’t build 90% of them, but give yourself the time to enjoy exploring the idea totally.

When I do this, once I do Google for existing solutions, I usually find that all the other things I came up with in the ensuing week are far better than what’s already out there. I have more innovative ideas for where it could go next; I have a unique value proposition that the other folks haven’t figured out yet. But had I searched for them first, I never would have come up with those better ideas at all.

Finally, I’ll say this: if you see your idea has already been done and you no longer care about it, then it probably wasn’t something you were passionate enough about in the first place; it was just a neat idea to you.

When we started CircleCI, there were at least 3 other things that were pretty much the same. In addition, two similar services had died, and one had pivoted to be a PaaS. There was also Jenkins, TeamCity, Bamboo, and lots of other alternatives. And then over the next two years, there was at least 20 competitors that started, some with significant funding.

I agonized over so many competitors, and none of them mattered. If you're going to do it, just do it.