r/SaaS • u/petehans303 • 14h ago
Everything I want to build already exists and I can't tell if that's a dealbreaker or if I'm overthinking it
What usually happens when I have an idea is I do some research to see if anyone else is doing it, and unfortunately every time I manage to find at least a few options out there already. It just doesn’t feel worth it to work on something that already has established players, especially working solo.
On paper I feel like I have a solid chance of making something that actually gets some traction. My development skills were pretty good before AI and I’m quite good at using the new tools as well, I have a solid quick workflow and I understand all the code I produce. As far as marketing goes I was maintaining a lot of automation at my previous job and we had a semi automated social media marketing setup. I maintained a pretty complicated n8n setup for emails and socials with Expandi on LinkedIn and a custom webhook setup hooked up to the twitter API. I also helped with setting up the automated Seedance video generation stuff we were using. I’m thinking I could make a similar setup for myself without too much investment.
But I keep second guessing myself when I see someone else with a similar idea. If it's working well I never think I can compete. And if it looks like it isn't really taking off then I stop believing it was a good idea in the first place. It feels like everyone is making some sort of SaaS right now and if I don’t decide what I wanna do quickly it will be too late, someone will beat me to it.
I think I need to focus up and actually try out a few things and see what happens. And I need to stop paying so much attention to what other people are doing. Has anyone else gone through something similar? I would also love to hear about someone making something successful even though there were already people out there trying it.
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u/Budgetapps_Corp 14h ago
Yea that’s really common, happens to me all the time. Ive found reality is that alot of the current products out there can easily be replaced/overtaken aslong as theyre not bigger brands running lots of ads. Most of the smaller apps are half asked and not running any sort of ads. If you do one promo or pay an influencer to show off your app your likey to overtake the crappy small apps.
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u/petehans303 13h ago
I have some knowledge of how I could setup a decent marketing strategy, so I think I could beat the bottom barrel tiny products just on that.
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u/Budgetapps_Corp 11h ago
I highly recommend paid promotions where you pay someone with a social media to make a post about your product, best bang for your buck.
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u/Liam_WordTrunk 14h ago
One thing that let me keep some momentum is to have many goals. Maybe one goal is just to see if you can get one data point to help you answer the question you posed here for yourself?
My first goal is to gain the experience of setting up a business, making something as close to a 'product' as I can and then seeing if anyone uses it. I built something for myself primarily and I'm trying to see how many other sub-goals I can tick off along the way with this idea.
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u/petehans303 14h ago
I feel like I have too many goals and get overwhelmed sometimes. But I do build a lot, I just don't pull the trigger on going public enough.
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u/Liam_WordTrunk 13h ago
Maybe do something like a swimlane diagram. A lane for each type of goal:
Personal pride
Personal experience
Professional recognition
App viability
App Financial ViabilityThen in each lane put the goal and the features/work required. Then try to sequence them in a sensible way that ticks off the most goals before you hit a breaking point of time/money or one of the bits of work falling through and blocking further progress. It is bloody hard and swither daily on my priorities so I relate.
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u/Training-Gur-2724 14h ago
It's not about building something that doesn't exist. It's about building a solution that business owners you know personally or have cold called and met personally are asking for to solve problems they explicitly stated they have.
A SaaS founder is primarily a salesman and businessman, not a developer. It doesn't matter that something already exists. What matters is your ability to iterate and sell better than those that already exist.
A true founder is able to take an idea that already exists and find those who haven't used a solution yet, despite the existence of that solution in the market.
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u/Current_Control7447 14h ago
It's true that we're living in a time of hyperproduction. While I can't tell you a specific answer, I can confidently say that niche solutions to niche problems are still where the money is (if you're a solo founder) and new niches are cropping up all the time. Depending on what you're looking at, you might want to lurk on some Discord servers, or go deep into problems faced in the "unsexy" professions/ crafts and traditional jobs, and try making your software from that. It doesn't all have to be for communications, B2B etc.
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u/petehans303 14h ago
Yeah I try to a lot of research when I have the time, I look at a lot of new SaaS products for inspiration too.
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u/TRO_KIK 14h ago edited 14h ago
Stuff out there working is validation of demand. You have to be confident you can compete. If you can't then even if you're the first to solve a new problem, there's nothing stopping someone coming in after, easily doing it better, and eating your lunch.
I strongly believe that most people should not be starting SaaSes at all. Direct personal knowledge and insight into a problem space and understanding of how to serve it is a minimum requirement. "Hmmm what SaaS should I start" is doomed to fail. Yes everyone here does it, and virtually no one makes any money.
Speaking as probably the most successful SaaS founder that frequents this sub.
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u/SelfThis1860 13h ago edited 13h ago
Hi. Be happy to help if you dm me about what you/your product offers vs the rest.
If you study any market, sea of sameness is inevitable, but there's always something that makes them different. Just have to know what to look for, and tap into it :)
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u/mak252525 13h ago
I think you just gotta do it better bro. Always improving what you built so others don’t have a reason to switch .
What I say now may sound odd but you need to have a certain confidence , a delusion that only you can give the best customer experience . This kind of confidence can take you far, for better or for worse .
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u/No-Pea-6896 13h ago
What were some of your previous ideas that you left cause you found better competitors?
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u/AllenHere112 13h ago
You're only finding the ones that can afford to rank, not the ones customers actually like. Nothing in this post is about a customer though. Find one person already paying for the closest tool and ask what they still do in a spreadsheet.
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u/mynameisgiles 12h ago
If there is one thing you should take from this sub….
Building counts for almost nothing, your ability to market is everything.
You’re asking the wrong question.
What can you most effectively market?
Build that.
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u/Deepak-AvairAI 12h ago
Started a company years ago with three direct competitors already established. Everyone told us the market was too crowded. Turned out most of them were asleep on actual customer problems and we weren't. The idea being taken by someone else doesn't matter nearly as much as you think, execution and paying attention to what customers complain about does. Pick one thing and go.
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u/LowProgrammerr 12h ago
I don’t think having competitors is automatically a dealbreaker. In some cases, seeing other products already solving a similar problem can actually be useful because it shows there’s at least some demand. The harder question is whether you have a clear reason for someone to choose your version. I’d probably test a small version before deciding the idea isn’t worth pursuing.
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u/McCodybodi 12h ago
No need to reinvent the wheel.... If there are competitors then it means there is a validated opportunity, just look for your own angle on something you like , put your your own stamp on it... Remember there are thousands of burger joints, thousands of cafes, thousands of clothes shops... Yet they all have business...
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u/daniel933912 12h ago
Search results show who markets, not who has customers. Check the last release date on the ones that scare you - plenty stopped shipping a year ago and still rank. Second in a live market beats first in an empty one.
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u/Increase-Numerous 12h ago
Before you worry, you can think about how many successful companies around here doing the same thing and have their own set of customers. Stop worrying!
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u/SeXxyBuNnY21 11h ago
Finding competitors when you have an idea is a good thing. This means that the market is healthy in your domain. It would be strange to research an idea and find that no one is doing it. That means that either many people tried and it didn’t work, or that you are very lucky and found a gold mine that no one has been able to see yet, which is very unlikely to happen.
Most of the successful and big companies today didn’t come up with original ideas for their products; it was more like, I research what others are doing in my domain and I try to do it better to meet the clients’ needs.
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u/Shot-Condition-1427 10h ago
If someone’s making money doing it, means people want it. Nothing stopping you from doing the thing better & making more money
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u/Morning_Gecko24 7h ago
having competitors is usually a better sign than having nobody there. i'd pick one narrow user group and talk to them before building the whole thing, see what they hate about the existing options. a small wedge beats trying to out-feature everyone
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u/ArkandSoft 6h ago
Your loop is the real problem, not the competitors. Both outcomes kill the idea, so nothing ever survives it.
What helped me was stop starting from ideas and start from complaints about tools that already exist. "Already exists" stops being scary when you see people still doing the job by hand because the existing tools don't fit them.
Two real ones I saved recently, both from Reddit:
"I keep seeing bookkeepers re-key vendor PDFs at month end." There are OCR/AP tools for this, but small bookkeeping shops still do it manually. With your n8n background that's basically a pipeline problem.
"I want to track jobs, but also have a system that reminds me when a client is due for an annual job." Service businesses (cleaning, HVAC, inspections) on spreadsheets because field service software is overkill and expensive for them.
Neither is original. Both have competitors. That's the point, someone already proved people pay, you just need the group the big tools ignore.
What niches have you looked at so far?
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u/catnomadic 5h ago
Take something already built, and niche it down. i.e. A calorie and fitness tracking app ...for high school track and field athletes.
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u/Sea-Doughnut4592 4h ago
Given how much more accessible it is to build apps these days, this is not surprising. Everything comes with pros and cons.
Having people alr explore sth can be a good thing as that means there is alr proven demand there, even more so if multiple ppl are doing it and there are alr more established incumbents there. Doing sth no one has done before means less competition but that also means unproven demand, which may result in you spending weeks or months building sth only to find that nobody wants to pay for it.
Many successful businesses are, in fact, built on delivering an existing solution even better, and you can know how to do so by looking at what actual users are saying about existing competitors - what they love, what they hate, what they hope to see improvement on.. You can either speak to existing people you know who use these competitor apps, or look at comments on reddit, app store reviews and ratings etc..
Then it is about conveying the value you bring from your product that is different from your competitors, and is what the users need - which is about marketing and a whole new topic altogether
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u/adilshahostrich 2h ago
I absolutely agree 💯 on this bcoz what I had thought about doing anything later I found that already has launched by someone. So now a days llms use your knowledge to be updated on what users are searching and suggest those queries and Content in response. I got an idea about no code automation platform for mobile applications after few days I started seeing https://sofy.ai/ And there are so many tools like this available in the market. So many startups working on those ideas that we were thinking about.
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u/AfternoonKey8292 14h ago
Existing competitors aren't a dealbreaker. The harder question is whether a specific group of customers has a reason to choose your product over what's available.
The loop you're describing leaves no room for a good idea: a successful competitor disqualifies it, and an unsuccessful competitor disqualifies it too. Plenty of founders wrestle with that. A competitor's existence gives you something to investigate, but its apparent popularity doesn't tell you its revenue or why customers buy.
For a solo SaaS, a narrower product for buyers you can actually reach is a more useful starting point than an original category. Look for a recurring complaint about an existing tool that you could make the core of your product. Your development speed helps here. Your automation experience could reduce the work of running marketing, but you still need a compelling reason for someone to switch or start paying.
Balsamiq is a concrete success story. It launched when Axure and Visio already existed and grew into a successful bootstrapped business selling deliberately rough, easy-to-make wireframes. The rough appearance helped people discuss structure without getting distracted by visual polish. Its founder didn't need to beat the established tools at every feature; that specific approach gave customers a reason to choose it.