Deciding to get off your butt is the hard part...until you do. Then it's the easy part. Anyone can decide.
Now getting something done - that's really the hard part. OP is right on: pick something small and get started. You don't have to quit your job.
And here's the tricky part: You have to get something done every day. Something, anything. It doesn't have to be big, it just has to be something. Get one little thing working each night after work and save the bigger stuff for the weekends.
When you cross something off you list every day, it feels empowering. And you see real progress.
OTOH, if you don't do this, before you know it 2 weeks will have gone by with nothing changed and a million good excuses. They one day you'll wonder, "What ever happened to that great idea I had on the way to work?"
And when you find competitors, you need to realize that probably no one else you know has heard of them. The people here have rather bleeding edge knowledge of start-ups. There may be 10 start-ups for your idea. Some of them are probably running on vapors at this point.
If nothing else, finding other people working on the same idea is a validation of the idea, since they think it is worth working on too. If you think you can do a better job at it than they can why not try it yourself?
In fact, if you find competitors in your market and they are using a free model to gain traction, don't be shy about taking them on with a paid model.
If customers find you first and you can close the deal, those other free competitors won't pose a threat. The caveat here is that you must keep your customers happy. However, if true customer satisfaction is just not quite attainable and you're in survival mode (due to being under resourced or what have you), simply keep the the level of pain that you create for them below the threshold of pain required to switch from your service to your competitors.
> rather than just soaking in that brief moment of illumination, I want you to do something about it because…
Well-stated.
My favorite example of inspiration meeting implementation is Dave Troy who wrote the initial Ruby on Rails code for TwitterVision in a few hours. I love the melding of art and technology. TwitterVision was featured recently in a MoMa exhibit.
"Steve: How did you get the idea for TwitterVision?
Dave: I literally wanted to know who in my area was using Twitter. They had an API that had location information, and I had recently completed some other work with Google maps, so within a few hours I had a working mashup that would show me the Twitter activity nearby. I then had the idea that it would be cool to animate the map, and set out to do it. Within a few short days, Twittervision was born."
This is like the adult version of everything the culture tells you where you're a kid: "you're special! you're a unique snowflake! you can do anything, if you just believe in it! follow your dreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeams!" The adult version is more succinct, ever so slightly more specific, and doesn't have all the pretty pictures, but it's the same thing.
Well, I grew up in the culture too, and I guess I drank the Kook-Aid. If it strikes any chord in you at all, you should probably go for it. If you want my advice, don't do what everyone else is doing. Not everything has to be a social networking webapp. Get off the net and read a book once in a while. Be in a hurry, but be smart and thoughtful about it too. Always Be Creating, but make it something you'll learn a lot from, even if it fails.
But why care about my advice? There are so many other people who will tell you what to do.
Similar to what Mark Cuban has said about business (paraphrasing) that it's non-stop competition. 24 hours a day there is somebody out there trying to kick your ass.
What I'll remember from this post : it's not that because something already exists that you can't do it better. I once talked to one of my friend who had a great idea but didn't even bother working on it. He just said "probably someone else is doing it" without even looking if it has been done or how. He keeps talking about leaving his job... since 2 years.
Now getting something done - that's really the hard part. OP is right on: pick something small and get started. You don't have to quit your job.
And here's the tricky part: You have to get something done every day. Something, anything. It doesn't have to be big, it just has to be something. Get one little thing working each night after work and save the bigger stuff for the weekends.
When you cross something off you list every day, it feels empowering. And you see real progress.
OTOH, if you don't do this, before you know it 2 weeks will have gone by with nothing changed and a million good excuses. They one day you'll wonder, "What ever happened to that great idea I had on the way to work?"