atavis

I've been working my first startup application for a couple of months out of hours from my 9-5. Not long ago a competitor surfaced and released an application which is very similar to what I have been working on.

They are targeting the same market and the application has the same features.

From what I have read so far about them they have been very successful (both financially and with creating a community of users) and the application is gaining traction. While this somewhat validates my feelings about the original idea in that it has been a great success for them, I am unsure what to do now.

Do I continue working on my own application and release it in a couple of months? I am pretty sure that there is enough market for it but I am no expert on marketing (far from it in-fact).

There are a number of older style web applications from competitors, both commercial and open source, but I feel that these are over complicated or bloated and my application is a fresh take on those with a greater emphasis on usability and simplicity (not through lack of features!) which the new competitor also provides. From research I have conducted on those they also appear to be performing very well financially.

Does anyone have any advice? Is this sort of thing normal and should I just ignore them and continue anyway?

Thanks