Would you enter an emerging industry to challenge a first mover with an obvious advantage?

Hello!

Many of us have recently heard or come across the term "NFT", which is basically digital collectibles verifiable on the blockchain. I'm in a very particular situation here.

All the marketplaces that exist right now, where people can trade NFTs (buy/sell/exchange), have a fundamental problem: search & curation. These marketplaces are so early just like the industry, they haven't even gotten to the point where they can solve this problem yet.

I had several ideas that if implemented, would create this be social media space for NFT creators & investors, to explore and discover NFT art, collectibles etc from their favorite artists in one place.

However, as I was looking around for similar solutions, I did found an existing solution for this. A VC-backed startup that started 5 months ago and has a Twitter following of 20k+ with all the major names in the NFT industry using and advocating for their platform, because they managed to solve the problem first.

Now, I strongly believe that competition is never a reason to NOT do business. Hell, I'm motivated even more to move into this space and bring new ideas to life that have not been implemented or even discussed within the space yet. I had a chance to discuss some of these ideas with several users and they were really moved.

I'm in this situation where I am struggling to decide whether I should continue pursuing my idea, which is mostly similar to them even though I imagined it separately but does some very specific things that may or may not help it stand out, or should I look for other opportunities in the space?

While I'm thinking about it, I'm already working on the idea. I'm a developer/product engineer with experience in consumer marketplaces. I have conceptualized, developed, and launched platforms in the past from scratch (for other early-stage startups at the pre-seed stage) so I got pretty much everything covered. What I'm lacking right now is clarity: is this something worth pursuing? Would you pursue this?

All thoughts and opinions are highly welcomed, thanks a bunch for reading all this!