[krishan711]

This happened to me a long time ago - i was making a "social" type product that was location based and a competitor launched theirs too but their founders were famous and they got loads of users straight away. In social, network effects matter so launching first does have a large benefit especially if the idea is new.

I gave up on the idea a few months later but kept an eye on the project. It didn't take off the way it was supposed to, and I have a feeling that if I was still working on my version I could have pivoted and taken advantage of what I was learning by watching them faster than they could have (they had so many users etc to support)!

And that was in social - in most other products network effects are nowhere near as powerful e.g. I tried linear.app for a side project even though i actually enjoy using lira at work. Since i have many projects it's easy to try new things on some and drop / change what doesn't work.

I think the "just ship it" oversimplification comes from the fact that getting user feedback is vital for most products. It doesn't mean that launching first is the goal though. The product I'm working on now is in a super crowded space (landing page creation) but it has an edge over others for a particular type of market (developers who don't want to mess around with UI, drag and drop etc but still want beauty and control) and even though the product is "ready" im not "just ship it"-ing because I'm busy "talking to users".