Someone built my idea!

One thing that I see a lot from founders, maybe especially indie hackers, is that somebody might have a great idea one day and just feel like this is something they want to build. Maybe even start building it a bit. But some way down the line, they choose to do a quick Google search and realize that – oh shit – somebody has already built this and they're just so much further along and there's no way to catch up. So screw it. Why even bother? I just wanted to offer my perspective on this. I think it's really instructive to look at two companies, and those companies are Loops and Resend. What you'll see is that both of these companies are actually backed by Y Combinator, and they both do marketing and transactional email. You could say that these companies do the same thing. But just by looking at their landing pages, you can see that what mainly differentiates them is not specifically the job or the task that they're helping companies do, but rather who they are helping. In the case of Loops, they help modern software companies, and you can just immediately see their whole design speaks to this. It's light, and if you scroll down a bit, there's a lot of focus on the UI – they even have some no code tools to let you design your emails. But if you have a look at Resend, it's clearly for developers. It's dark, it looks like it gives secret super-powers, and of course has dark mode for developers. And if you scroll down a bit, you'll see that they choose to focus on code exampels right from the start. This is just something that I think it's really important to remember – that even though other people or other companies out there are working on the same particular problem that you are, that doesn't mean that you can't focus on a particular type of customer and just do a way better job. I can guarantee you that there are some people that will look at these two companies and just say immediately: This is the one that I want to go for. If I'm a developer, I'll almost certainly go for Resend. But if I'm working in marketing in a software company, I'll definitely go with Loops. So I just want to say: Remember this and to not only think about the problems that you want to solve, but also who you want to solve it for. And if you do that really well, you'll be just fine. There is just so much room in the market.