Tell me if i'm wasting my time please.

Hey IH,

I have had many a great idea that I didn't act on because either it has been done or I felt like my app would end up like the sorry ones you see with 0 downloads an 1 review from the dev.

I'm gonna tell you the problems / doubts i have and maybe someone with exp can weigh in or provide some insight.

I am creating an app and I have one major competitor

Now that competitor has over the years acquired tons of funding and has a large amount of data, that 10m users have contributed to over that time.
as well as a partnership with a global provider of map data (Nat Geo)

Problem :
Why would someone use my app and not my competitor.
While i am confident I can get local installs and do pretty well in my country - > will this be enough? (South Africa).

If i build it will the data come? here is an example :

I build a recipe app that allows users to create and browse recipes how will i get my first users with no recipes in the DB? (Its a bad example because there are API's for this, but in my field I have no datasets to leverage)

I just dont want to create a metaphorical ferrari, and it never gets driven because no one fills it up.