How to market a unique product in an overcrowded market without it being immediately associated with existing ones?

Seems like you'd need to get to the value add very quickly -- e.g., demo specifically of what it does differently/better (or at least better for people whose brains work like you). I'm envisioning a landing page with "not just another todo app" on it and a video (or fancy web animation) of some whiz-bang features that clearly differentiate it

Overcrowded means that thing is easy to do and even if you do something new, somebody can replace it with ease. It very tricky to compete in overcrowded market and the best approach is to get whoever in you reach to use the product.

Things like promoting on social media and hoping people to use it will not work but dm someone who know you and you know they already using to do list you can request them to try it out and then if they like it as them to suggest the tool to fellow friends.

Here are some stuff that might be useful to compete in overcrowded market How to Successfully Market a Unique Product in an Overcrowded Market

Add notification as a free feature, and you will be ahead of half of the market

Find a niche and provide value. You can, for example, make a browser extension out of it and integrate the todo list in the browser...etc, there are many way to niche down.

I'd say find your USP by niching down.

Harry Dry gave a great example in Marketing Examples.

Loom differentiated itself from the endless number of other screen recording softwares.

Direct quote from his newsletter.

"Until, one day, Loom came up with a point of view:"

1. The way remote teams communicate sucks.

2. Meetings are boring. Calls drag on. Email lacks personality.

3. The solution? Async video messaging."

They created a new category.

The mushy bucket of screen recording softwares

Vs

The "video messaging for work" bucket

They owned that category.

“Send a video message” quickly became “Send a Loom”.

Would link directly to his post but I can't post links yet. Just Google Harry Dry Loom if you're interested. It's a great post.

Is there an "Easily Distracted" (ADHD?) community?

I'd look for self-help discussion groups in such, talk about your problems and how you've struggled. Then, depending on their self-promotion rules, ask for feedback on your app. Ask people to find what you did wrong, weak points in branding, UX, user flow.

You will get better negative feedback by priming people with permission to be negative & it can be a seed of how to improve the feature.

I think you need to put the differentiating feature right in front of people's eyes. What is it that makes your app work? That key thing that other apps were missing? If you can explain this to me in one sentence (or image), I will consider using your app. If you discovered something novel about how distraction works, write an article that could be shared on Hacker News and include a link to your app.