I'm in a loop

It’s actually a habit thing.

The habit is probably feeding itself due to the emotional rides like excitement for the new idea.

The best way to approach this is to replace the same excitement feeling with a different trigger and effect. Start making small experiments or mini projects that you can quickly see results and feel excited about.

So the outcome is that you will get more value from finishing small projects rather than just thinking of new ideas.

Hope that helps 🙏

I know how you feel, and I am the same. But to give credit to @anilkilic, he is absolutely right here. Because someone else may have thought about solving the same problem, that does not mean they are doing it better than you could. And even if they do it better than you ever could, does not mean your idea can't compete.

Example A:
Salesforce. How dare Hubspot ever try to compete with that behemoth? Still, they did. Because they would solve the exact same problem, just slightly different, for a different target group.

Example B:
Your Idea. Another competitor may already be huge. Still, you can solve the exact same problem with a slightly different angle. Boom. Now you can compete, just with a slightly different target group.

Exist? -> So what?

Look at Deliveroo, Doordash, Uber Eat, Foodpanda

Okay... how about Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, Carrd, Tilda etc...

Let’s be frank.

Ideas are cheap. If you don’t execute, you will be an idealist and lurker forever.

Focus on your customers and discover a problem worth to solve. Or you back to the loop.

Don't be too afraid of competition. I actually like the idea of a niche with a few competitors. It means someone else did the hard work of validating the idea, and that puts you in a position to build something with more information than they had when they started. In theory you can improve on what's out there.

Personally I'm building in a space with dozens of competitors with tens of millions in funding each, online ordering for restaurants. To me that's validation that the market is massive, and my SaaS will thrive if I can carve out a very small fraction of users with more niche needs.

I think the problem is that the idea existing stops you. Whether something exists or not should be largely irrelevant, the only part that matters is whether you can get customers for your version of it.

Sometimes it exists and the player is so dominant it's not worth entering. Sometimes it exists and it proves there's a market, people are not happy with the incumbent, most of the market is not served, etc.

Same thing happens in the opposite direction. Just because something doesn't exist doesn't mean it's a valuable idea. It might not exist because it makes no sense.

I have found cases where the product existed and it was brilliant but nobody knew about it. All the people that needed it were still searching for it. Cloning the product and having a better marketing strategy would have been a brilliant move.

There are two ways to look at this:

1. You don't need a highly differentiated idea

I won't say much here as others in the thread are making this point. But if the market is big enough, it can happily sustain multiple products that solve similar problems. So it's not really a problem if the product already exists in some form. It could be a problem if it exists in the exact form that you envisioned in which you probably should think of how to pivot the idea to target a niche / different market.

2. You need a more differentiated idea

If the problem is that you keep coming up with ideas that have been executed long ago, then you probably need to work on your ideation.

While I agree with the general rule that "a market can support multiple players" it's no fun entering a market full of established players, when you don't have a sufficiently differentiated idea. All that means is you'll spend months / years playing catch up and most likely lose faith along the way.

There's no fixed formula for getting better at differentiating but I do think that life experience is a force multiplier. Do some consulting work, increase your exposure to different types of business / audience, and learn what new problems people have.

Why is having the idea already existing a detriment? Were you hoping to create something so new and different it would be an immediate hit? Even if it exists look at your angle. Is the angle strong enough to get you market share?

The same problem should have many different types of solutions.
If there's a SaaS, think of a info product that could solve the same problem, or an agency business model. If you can build an agency to solve the problem, then maybe you can make software for the agency instead of directly solving with SaaS. Might even be a bigger market than direct SaaS.