Do I stop when I find a competitor?
So, I finally had an idea I felt good about. A friend of mine complained about having to make "social-media" images for each of his posts. I said, you could probably automate that considering that his posts had similar images each time. (This is the og-graph tags images that then help for Twitter Cards, and Facebook posts etc).
Plus, I have noticed for a while that my notion page, whenever I post a link, often doesn't have the best of "images" so they look ugly. I often wondered why such famous websites hadn't that kind of stuff handled.
I actually built out a solution. However, soon after, discovered that somebody already got there and has built essentially a very similar solution already. One that's fairly famous.
My product as a whole basically does what there's does but different themes and that's basically it. I had quite a few ideas to make it better. Things like having the capability to edit images even after publishing them, far more themes, etc but haven't yet built those.
However, I am slightly unsure now whether I should even considering releasing such a solution. Would you still release something? Try to get users?
If you've built it already, here are the questions I'd ask
Everything you've done is a "sunk cost". If you don't get anything for that, there's a negative ROI. However, if you go down this and it's a rabbithole, you've lost time you could devote to your next venture or something else entirely - this is your "opportunity cost."
Those questions are to help you think through whether opportunity cost is high enough to ignore the sunk costs. And, remember, costs are not just (or even primarily) money.
I'd probably launch it and do next to nothing and see what happens while I take a break and contemplate other ideas. If there's even a little bit of traction, it means there's a market for someone different than your "famous" competitor.
Almost every problem has some sort of solution out there. You have to ask yourself what your unique take on the solution is and why customers would choose you over a competitor.
Competition validates that there’s already demand.
Most definitely don't be discouraged by competition. If anything, it validates that you are or were on the right track (if they have users you don't have yet). There can be a problem with competition, but only if there's TOO MUCH of it. If you're trying to make a Flappy Birds clone and have no original twist to apply to it, you're probably not going to find success. But if there's only a small handful of competitors, then definitely go in and do your best to stay moving. You can compete in price, in quality, in features, in character and even in being at the right place at the right time. There's a lot of fish in the sea, and your job isn't to catch them all. If you can manage to have a good year of fishing, nobody cares about the other boats out there.
There are some questions you first have to answer:
If the answers are positive, I would suggest you make a calculation, of how much it would cost to run the solution as a service. (There are plenty of hostings that are cheaper than AWS or GCP where you can run your own VPS and spin multiple projects.) If it does not cost much and you can afford it, I would recommend launching it.
I would say that it is good if there is already a competition of what you are doing. In that case, you already know that there is a need for that, as you are not the only one with the idea. Try to check out competitors, maybe they share their users count or MRR. This would give you a lot of information on what you could expect. You could also check their marketing materials, so you would be able to spot their strengths and weaknesses and spin up your marketing campaign accordingly.
Releasing your solution will give you a lot of valuable experience despite if the product will succeed or fail. Go for it.
Keep us posted, on how it's going :)
Sounds like a cool idea. I have an idea of how I might solve this problem, but I don't know how you've solved it, and I don't know who your "fairly famous" competitor might be off the top of my head. You also managed to build your solution before finding them. All this is to say that if you differentiate yourself in marketing, pricing, and/or features, you could very easily still have a viable product even if potential users already know about your competitor, and it seems like many potential users might not already know about your competitor.
Which one easier for you;
Finding a unique solution, creating a new category and explaining it to world for the first time.
Build what you build and market it further than your competitor.
I'd assume there are at least 10 solutions alike, which means 9 of them didn't give up due to competition. Finding a unique solution is already something unique, doesn't happen often and when you do there is no guarantee for someone else to compete. It's more likely to happen.
"Things like having the capability to edit images even after publishing them, far more themes," So if you think these will put your product in a better position keep on going.