Is there any point in creating a product in a crowded market?

I'm in a similar boat — building a tech news aggregator, which is an extremely crowded space (Feedly, Hacker News, etc.).

What's helped me think about it differently: crowded markets mean validated demand. The question isn't "is there room?" but "what specific frustration am I solving that others aren't?"

For me, the angle was: Japanese tech blogs (Zenn, Qiita) have great content that never reaches English-speaking devs. Plus, most aggregators give you headlines — I wanted structured summaries with prerequisites and tradeoffs, so you know if an article is worth your time before clicking.

That's not a feature list. It's a positioning story: "tech insights from Japan, summarized so you don't waste time."

For your session recording tool, I'd ask: what's the moment where someone using Hotjar thinks "this is annoying"? That frustration is your angle. Maybe it's pricing cliffs, or script load time, or just overwhelming dashboards. Find that and own it.

What specific user pain made you start building this in the first place?

I can relate—building a “me-too” tool can feel like shouting into a crowded room. A few things that helped me when I faced the same challenge:
Focus on a specific niche – Even small differences in target audience can make you stand out. For example, instead of “anyone with a website,” target indie SaaS founders, e-commerce shops, or a particular vertical.
Solve one pain extremely well – You don’t need all the features your competitors have. Find the one problem they’re missing or under-delivering on and own it.
Leverage existing communities – Post in Reddit, Indie Hackers, and relevant Slack/Discord groups where your ideal users hang out. Timing matters—answer questions when someone is actively asking for a solution.
Content-first marketing – Case studies, blog posts, or short tutorials showing how your tool solves a real pain often beats ads.
Sometimes traction comes more from positioning and distribution than feature parity. If you want, I can brainstorm some angles that could differentiate your session recording/analytics tool in a crowded market.
Do you want me to draft a shorter, punchy version that works really well on Indie Hackers?

Crowded markets aren't the problem. Undifferentiated positioning is.

"Session recording tool" puts you in a bucket with Hotjar, FullStory, PostHog, LogRocket, and dozens of others. You're competing on features with companies that have years of head start and millions in funding. That's a losing game.

A few questions that might help reframe:

1. Why indie hackers specifically?
   Your positioning tells me who, but not why. What about indie hackers makes them underserved by Hotjar or PostHog? Price? Complexity? Something else?

2. What do people hate about the current options?
   Pricing cliffs? Slow load times from heavy scripts? Data privacy concerns? Overwhelming dashboards? If you can find a specific frustration and solve it better than anyone, you have positioning.

3. What's your unfair advantage?*
   Are you willing to offer pricing that VC-backed competitors can't match? Do you have domain expertise in a specific vertical? Can you be radically simpler because you're not trying to be everything?

The "yet another X" framing is a trap. The uptime checker guy probably succeeded not because he built another uptime checker, but because he found a specific angle (price, simplicity, audience, distribution) that made him the obvious choice for someone.

More features won't fix this. Clearer positioning might.

What's the one thing about Scryspell that would make a specific type of customer choose you over Hotjar?