This is exactly how I feel over the past couple of years, and each time I convinced myself that it's better to have competitors.. because it makes sense, right? (potential users, their needs, etc.)
But somehow this feeling that other people also came up with that cool idea ("my idea", "the idea") took all my passion about the project away.
My biggest disappointment was when I see flavours.me while I was coding exactly the same. I was thinking to make the website involved with information retrieval/recommendation though, but the interface was going to be exactly the same. At that time, I even started a master's program with an emphasis on machine learning in order to code this project better and my thesis advisor was an author of one of the machine learning books that's being recommended at hackerbooks.com and probably one of the best academic I can study on machine learning). Everything was going perfect --until a friend of mine told me about flavours.me... and all my passion just went away because I was exactly looking at the project that I was gonna implement -even the backend was going to be much more different.
But then, when about.me got acquired by AOL, I disappointed much more because they did the same project with flavours.me and they got successful.. Now, I can realize that it's not about the unique idea. It's about to fill tiny gaps, and keep trying until you bet your competitors. And a couple of months ago, I started my project again and I think it's gonna be awesome.
But still, I think it discourages to see an implemented copy of your idea before getting started to work on it. Maybe it's better to come up with a quick (but not that dirty) implementation of the project, and then looking for competitors (and hopefully, to see you are doing better) and then improving your idea.
But somehow this feeling that other people also came up with that cool idea ("my idea", "the idea") took all my passion about the project away.
My biggest disappointment was when I see flavours.me while I was coding exactly the same. I was thinking to make the website involved with information retrieval/recommendation though, but the interface was going to be exactly the same. At that time, I even started a master's program with an emphasis on machine learning in order to code this project better and my thesis advisor was an author of one of the machine learning books that's being recommended at hackerbooks.com and probably one of the best academic I can study on machine learning). Everything was going perfect --until a friend of mine told me about flavours.me... and all my passion just went away because I was exactly looking at the project that I was gonna implement -even the backend was going to be much more different.
But then, when about.me got acquired by AOL, I disappointed much more because they did the same project with flavours.me and they got successful.. Now, I can realize that it's not about the unique idea. It's about to fill tiny gaps, and keep trying until you bet your competitors. And a couple of months ago, I started my project again and I think it's gonna be awesome.
But still, I think it discourages to see an implemented copy of your idea before getting started to work on it. Maybe it's better to come up with a quick (but not that dirty) implementation of the project, and then looking for competitors (and hopefully, to see you are doing better) and then improving your idea.