6 months after starting developing my webapps I found out that I have one competitor that runs basically the same application service 2,5years already. There was no clue of him when I researched the field just came across by accident today. I feel quite desperate now he has features I didn't even think of and which are amazing. I don't know what to do now

Story of my life:

1. Created an app and released it but the difference I did know there was an alternative, yet I continued with what I had in mind and got my own set of users, though my goal was not defeating my competitor, but instead gaining my own space even though he was the first and the best

2. I'm no OS/Kernel dev yet I released my kernel, and the first thing everyone said: What use does this bring? We already have an alternative which is by far more mature than yours, yet I ignored and replied: Time will show.

Was afraid as I have no experience nor knowledge in C/C++ yet I reached a point where my competitor had to downvote my kernel just to break the 5/5 (20 votes) for my kernel, he even reported it to the mods claiming I'm not uploading the modified source code.

Long story short, don't give up, don't be greedy and want to take those 7 billion humans as your users, do what you have to, be creative :)

In the 80ties Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer sold IBM an operating system they didn't even had. After the sales pitch at IBM they drove to a guy they knew and bought his hobby os for 20'000 dollars. They called it MS DOS.

IBM could have taken any operating system on the market. But they took that from Microsoft because they sold it better.

So don't be disapointed. Do user tests, find out on how you can improve your product so that it fits the users needs better than your competitors. But the most important thing, educate yourself in MARKETING.

If you couldn't find him when actually looking for his product, you have nothing to worry about.

Finish it. There was MySpace before Facebook.

All above comments are great and really useful. Totally agree. But .. I am just gonna drop this here to have a variety of opinions. Ok?

If you are willing, you can try to contact him and work together if he was also willing.

@Root that's very clever,
marketing is an important factor indeed

Thanks for ur support helped me a lot