As a synonym, every time I had an APP idea, I search the play store and App Store and there are at least 10 variants. Discarded. After this happened couple of times, I have had enough.
I decided to create an app to browse and search through videos on your computer. There are many out there, but none had the specific set of features (and visual appeal) that I wanted.
I now sell about 100 copies per month for about $500 income per month. I give $350 to charity for every 100 copies, but that's a personal decision.
Building it has been a great learning experience. Interacting with customers has been a very rewarding experience (so many people love it).
It has sorting, tagging, and advanced filtering options (fuzzy search, regex, etc) - you just have to enable them in the settings menu.
Building your own copy is also hassle-free, just npm install, npm run build. Version 3 (releasing this month) already on main branch, has more features than public version.
Kudos to you, that's awesome, especially giving most of it to charity. How did you reach your customers? At 5 dollars per sale, that's around 100 customers per month for something that seems relatively non-essential
Google analytics shows traffic as mostly direct and from Google; the next largest fraction coming from Reddit (I shared it a few times), and many from GitHub. I have never paid for advertisements.
The first time I shared it on HN it went to the front page :)
A possible better way than better, is being different :)
When you try to make a better product, you are automatically comparing yourself to other products. Instead, when you try to be different you are creating your own niche and your own rules. Yor product will not be compared against others. At least if you fail, you will be original and not another copy-cat.
Finally decided to go anyway.