So a very interesting thing happened today and I am curious to throw this out to the community and see what you folks feel. As some of you know, I have been working on listenlater.in for a bit. I wrapped up the few things that were pending for me to do a proper launch and have sent it for testing yesterday. I was just exploring other domains I should get when I stumbled upon listenlater.fm (which is taken) and if you check the website, it is EXACTLY the same product 🙃 Talk about zeitgeist. We have some difference in UI and pricing structure, but both the products are exactly the same with the same name. On doing some research, this was launched in Dec 2020 and has more features than what I have -- but is super basic (same as mine). On googling a bit, I realised that the other service has an upcoming page on product hunt. (There are other services launched on PH called Listen Later which are a different product, but I digress). I am thinking strongly about rebranding (changing the name & domain) before launching. Don't want to have people accuse me stealing the idea & the name 😬 later. A friend suggested I should reach out to the guy running the other website and see if he wants to collaborate. Just curious to know what you folks would do if you were in my position? (Please post your comments in the thread).

Audiblogs is also a competitor and they "seem" to be doing well so far? So I suppose the other guy just abandoned the project due to other reasons? (I remember some "productivity" youtuber plugging Audiblogs, but I cannot recall who it was)

Wow. Audioblogs is excellent. Haha .. I had no clue. Thanks for the pointer. Had I seen Audioblogs, I'd probably not have gone down this route 😬

There will always be a competitor (or an old player) solving same problem as you do, it always depends on good execution even if your product has exact same features. People often want alternatives offering exact same thing, if I were you, I wouldn't give up.

Change name, launch.

What Kushal said..there'll be always someone doing what you do. Even if there's no one when you launch, a competitor can pop-up out of nowhere soon... The fact that you had to find others via domain search makes the case for you to launch..You have plenty of users who want your product but haven't heard of anyone else offering it :) Rebranding is a good idea as you don't want users to end up on .fm .. On a sidenote, curio.io might be a good reference for you (great product and UI)..

There will always be competition. Competition that is doing well is a great signal. It means that the core problem is validated and the market is ready to adopt it and pay for it. Now I need to find a different angle to solve this problem, either by making the product differentiated, or solving an adjacent market, or having a different packaging, etc. Competition that is not doing well is generally a bad sign. It either means • There is no market, in which case I'd park the project and validate this first. • None of the solution worked so far. In which case I'd work hard to identify why those solutions didn't work. You can reach out to the competition for this, or talk to their users. I'd continue when I'm convinced that my solution is inherently different or will have better distribution. You should definitely change the name and domain. Do also reach out to the other competition if they are willing to work together or to "sell" you their name and existing customers if any.

I would change the name and launch!

yeah, change the name and launch. pitch it so hard even AudioBlogs has to google who this guy is 😅