I feel this deep in my bones. I worked on <some project> a long while back because I wanted to scratch an itch, and I thought that some of the problems I was seeing, hey, maybe someone else was having them too. So I start kinda-sorta-half-heartedly exploring the idea, writing some pilot code, then I discovered hacker news. And oh boy did people have things to say about the general problem, it's impossible to solve, no one should waste their time, we can just <do the drop box thing and wire up ninety five things and make it shamble along>, definitely no need to waste time trying to implement something new from scratch.
Then I dropped it, because, hey, the glitterati of hacker news and all of the others must be right, huh? I let it wither, while working on other things, working for other people, making them wealthier, while all in the back of my mind I keep thinking: "maybe I should keep working on it."
Services doing the same exact thing started popping up. They get traction. Users are mostly happy with what they were doing, but they didn't have half of the features that I had already implemented in the code that hadn't seen any use outside of my testing environment. Some take off so well they have a now-publicly traded company doing the same thing. Ten years after I started my little project.
Fuck.
Lesson learned. The naivete of youth is a harsh teacher. Work on it. Put more effort into it. Ship it. Go with your gut--you probably have a better sense than you think you do of what will work and what won't. Ignore the hivemind. Don't leave room for the regret you will inevitably feel when you're scooped.
Actually it is not that bad. New ideas often require a significant push so people not only get comfortable with it but also start to demand it. Having someone else bigger to do this hard work opens an actual market for it that you can now enter.
You don't need to be first or second, esp. if you're a small player. You can still win some market share over time (and it doesn't need to be small compared to what you would achieve if you would be first as the market is now bigger). Make it helpful to people who find the established solutions lacking on features or workflows that could be better.
In other words, when is it the right time to ship? With a good product, at any time. Does it matter that there are already multiple established players? Not really, you can always come up with a better version.
I'm sorry that happened to you. The comments here are generally high quality and I've learned quite a lot from them, but there are things I've learned from experience that go against conventional wisdom here.
Although not as drastic a case as yours, I think it's often worth being critical of what one reads here and keeping one's ideals until actual experience makes one incline one way or the other.
I would say if you take hacker news advice about what works, you're a bit of a fool. HN readers are in the pool of people who would be your competition.
In my case, I was talking about technical things like data structures and IMGUI/RMGUI, which I don't think anyone feels motivated to trick others about. :)
Then I dropped it, because, hey, the glitterati of hacker news and all of the others must be right, huh? I let it wither, while working on other things, working for other people, making them wealthier, while all in the back of my mind I keep thinking: "maybe I should keep working on it."
Services doing the same exact thing started popping up. They get traction. Users are mostly happy with what they were doing, but they didn't have half of the features that I had already implemented in the code that hadn't seen any use outside of my testing environment. Some take off so well they have a now-publicly traded company doing the same thing. Ten years after I started my little project.
Fuck.
Lesson learned. The naivete of youth is a harsh teacher. Work on it. Put more effort into it. Ship it. Go with your gut--you probably have a better sense than you think you do of what will work and what won't. Ignore the hivemind. Don't leave room for the regret you will inevitably feel when you're scooped.