Ask HN: Are you put off building something because it already exists?
A while ago, I was in the same boat. Why try to recreate GitHub, or Uber, or Salesforce, or Facebook? And once I discovered any competitors in my idea&#x27;s field, I would chalk it down to &quot;not worth trying&quot; and call it a day.<p>But then I realized, if my town can have 3-4 Chinese restaurants with the same exact menus (probably supplied by the same exact distributors), and they&#x27;ve all operated continuously for over a decade....who cares about uniqueness? Sure, none of these copycat places are raking in millions, but it&#x27;s enough to support the livelihoods of the owner and all of his&#x2F;her employees, so who cares? Your business doesn&#x27;t need to be a unicorn to make you happy, as long as you&#x27;re happy with that outcome.<p>Of course, tech does not operate the same way as Chinese restaurants, and for that I point you to Accumulative Advantage:<p>&gt;Accumulative Advantage is when a small advantage at the beginning of something, such as kindergarten, becomes a little difference that leads to an opportunity that makes a bigger difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turns leads to another opportunity, which makes that initial small difference even bigger.<p>Put in context: You don&#x27;t have to follow the same path your competitors did. Uber&#x2F;Lyft poured billions into normalizing the concept of being driven by some stranger who uses the same app as you, so any new ride-sharing platform can spend that money in other areas. Giants like Microsoft have decades of technical debt they need to tackle; you can start building with 2019 libraries, 2019 paradigms (wouldn&#x27;t the cloud have been great for startups ten years ago?) and 2019 performance.<p>In order for the underdog to win, there first <i>has</i> to be an underdog. If you&#x27;re brave enough to start, you may just be brave enough to win.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;educationinnovation.typepad.com&#x2F;my_weblog&#x2F;2008&#x2F;12&#x2F;is-your-birthday-an-advantage-in-school-malcolm-gladwell-thinks-it-is.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;educationinnovation.typepad.com&#x2F;my_weblog&#x2F;2008&#x2F;12&#x2F;is...</a> (yeah, weird source, but I&#x27;m just trying to define the phrase)