How do you recover when confronted with "there are no new ideas" in real life?

I have experienced that feeling with some ideas of my own, and I know how unpleasant it is. I have also deliberately set out to create a product in a really saturated marked (website builders).

Really the only difference are your expectations. You were expecting to be the first one with the idea. Think of it the other way round. Let's say you started this and they came in second.. would you stop?

In terms of competing directly: you don't have to. The internet is big enough for two companies doing the same thing.

I read it somewhere that only in the IT/startup fields we have this strange sense that we must make something unique: think of how many bottles producer are there in the world or how many malls or how many groceries or how many screwdriver manufacturer are there!

Has anyone competed directly and had some success?

Yes, we entered the saturated market of time tracking software to provide a better user experience for a specific niche.

Having a completely original idea is great, but so is finding what's wrong with the existing solutions and fixing it.

Google wasn't the first Search Engine,
Facebook was't the First Social Network,
indiehackers wasn't the first Community...

In todays date, if what you thought of doesn't exist yet - you are thinking something nobody wants.

Tech thinkers and product innovators have pretty much discovered (almost) all kind of problems they could solve with tech and build things around them.. Some great, some ugly and some bad...

Now its just matter of who does it better, their product and marketing skills.

Most ideas are generated combinatorial. When millions of people have the same inputs, many of them will combine those inputs in similar ways and arrive at similar ideas.

If you want more unique thinking, you need more unique inputs. What do you read that most your peers don't? Is any of it from a very different industry or hobby? Is any of it 100+ years old or in a non-European language? Or is all of your input coming from news aggregators and your social media graph?

Rank-ordered, here would be the areas I'd focus on if I wanted to be very unique:

1. The cutting edge of technology. Master hard skills and "live in the future".
2. Older writing. It's amazing how herd-like culture can be and how often cycles emerge. This is also the easiest item.
3. Non-English languages. This is a huge time investment, but it will give you perspective you'll never otherwise encounter.
4. Subcultures. It's probably no accident that so many SV successes over the years had an overlap with hippies, burning man go-ers, crypto-enthusiasts and other non-conformists.

Has anyone competed directly and had some success?
Yes, but it was a brutal, four-year slog and the success was only moderate.

Hi Greg,

This happens to a lot of people a lot of the time. You are not alone, don't worry! I've had it a couple dozen of times now and although it is somewhat disappointing every single time, I have learnt new approaches to what to take from the experience.

Just because someone got there first, doesn't mean you failed at any level. You are an innovator and inventor. Keep going and eventually, you will be the first to market.

Gain more confidence in your ideas, this one was clearly good enough that someone brought it to market and is successfully executing on it (or maybe they aren't, in which case, compete!). You will have more ideas, keep chasing them!

Persistence is key. Don't be discouraged.

What market is that company targeting with their sales copy? What problems are they claiming to solve for their market? Who else in another market has a similar problem that this product kinda solves but not quite?
Find those people, what they need and why product A doesn't cut it for them.
Make a version targeted at them.

You probably won't become Facebook but the MySpace guy is currently asleep in his yacht next to a supermodel.

Fieldbook / Airtable
Pivotal / Jira
Windows Mobile / iOS
Sony Walkman / Apple iPod
Oracle / MongoDB (to a certain extent)

The bottom line: Relax and go back to work on your project.
It's pretty rare when there could only be one actor in a market.

Ideas are only one part of the whole equation.

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