About 50% of my projects die in the following way:
1) I've got an idea for a useful library that might finally make my GitHub not look so lame!
2) Search github: (idea) language:(language)
3) Oh, there's the exact thing I was going to build. Never mind.
Another 49% die this way:
1) It'd be so cool to have X!
2) (thinks about time to actually develop X versus real value it would give me and likelihood of anyone paying me for it to make up the difference)
3) Oh man, screw that, it's not even worth 1/100 that amount of effort.
I'm terrible at generating projects for "itch scratching" reasons because I cost/benefit them to death first, or I think of them 6 months after someone else already had the idea :-/
The thing I love most about the cpan is step 3. I don't tend to do steps 1 and 2 much because of that. However occasionally I find I get to step 3.5 - oh I need that and the maint has given up on it. Usually I chat to the original author and discover I don't need the feature. Rarely, I'll [steal maintenance](https://metacpan.org/pod/Plack::App::FakeApache) to get some of the features I need.
Bingo. If there's nobody else already out there selling what you're thinking about doing, there's probably a reason. And the reason is probably not "nobody thought of this yet".
And odds are, if there is just one player in the market they're not very good. Simply by virtue of being the only one; the odds of that being the case simply because they are amazing and perfect is so miniscule. It's most likely that no one has bothered, or had the effort to out-do them.
1) I've got an idea for a useful library that might finally make my GitHub not look so lame!
2) Search github: (idea) language:(language)
3) Oh, there's the exact thing I was going to build. Never mind.
Another 49% die this way:
1) It'd be so cool to have X!
2) (thinks about time to actually develop X versus real value it would give me and likelihood of anyone paying me for it to make up the difference)
3) Oh man, screw that, it's not even worth 1/100 that amount of effort.
I'm terrible at generating projects for "itch scratching" reasons because I cost/benefit them to death first, or I think of them 6 months after someone else already had the idea :-/
[EDIT] cleanup