No Competition? That's Usually a Red Flag for Solopreneurs

That doesn't automatically mean that your idea can't be successful, but it does mean that you should take a step back and do a hard rethink. Maybe you can identify the reason everyone else is avoiding it and can eliminate or bypass the problem, for instance. But there almost certainly is a problem that you haven't spotted. Further, it's probably a hard problem to solve, since nobody else has managed it.

This kind of thing is one of the several reasons why you don't want to be the first to enter a product category ("the pioneers get the arrows"). The sweet spot to aim for is to be second or third. Then the market is already validated, and you can also learn how to make your product better by learning from the mistakes of your competition.

Price. They have overhead. They have growth expectations for future funding rounds and tend to overpay to acquire customers when their product is stock valuation.

"Your margin is my opportunity"

Phrases like, “The moment that broke me wasn’t the empty dashboard. It wasn’t the crickets after launch” or “Here’s what I missed: Those competitors weren’t obstacles. They were validation” (random bolding that ChatGPT does omitted) are just so banally awful it makes me weep.

Wouldn't that mean that you did enter a validated market with competitors? So there must be some other reason you didn't get revenue?

The broken execution can include being twisted by perverse incentives.

Example: social media tending to converge on a mix of outrage doom-scrolling for engagement, selling out privacy, and force-feeding ads/ideas.

I ran into the perverse incentives problem, in a different space (not social media). Basically, there's a fairly simple solution to a problem for the majority of users/customers with this problem. But they need assistance at scale, like from a tech company, and there are perverse incentives for a company to pretend to solve the problem, while actively working against solving it. There's big demand for a solution, but most of the money is in not solving it, and it's easy money. One big player even acquires most of the competition, and twists them into the same awfulness, just with different veneers. (And, if you're a pair of idealistic cofounders who actually want to solve the problem, and you need funding, you would rather abandon it and work on something less conflicted, than sort through all the investors and prospective CEOs who would tell you what you want to hear, while thinking of it as a warm-fuzzy marketing story for the same awful, and ultimately you'd be misleading your users into the same awful easy-money exit endgame.)