The shock that gets you motivated

I've been happil;y working away on the website I came up, Act Reel, for the past year now. I was proud of it and of the idea. A site to help people interested in amateur theatre to connect and make it easier to run their shows and performances. I thought I was on to a winner and was surprised nobody else came up with it.

Well, somebody else came up with it.

My friends who run an amateur theatre company got an email from another website that does a very similar thing.

This broke me for a bit. I've put a lot of effort and by extension hope into the success of this website I'm developing, and now I'm finding out that there's competition. This other website also doesn't have many users, seems they are just starting out as well, but they had a bit of a head start on me. I started to feel like my endeavours had been pointless.

After a bit of freaking out though, I decided to try and change my perspective. I was still getting positive feedback from my friends who knew of my idea and were trying it out and so I looked at what I could do to make my website better. I came up with more ideas and I chose to look on this competition as a reason to push myself to make further improvements to the website quickly. Since finding out about this other site, I've been incredibly productive, getting through numerous improvements to my website such as a clanedar feature to help organise and schedule rehearsals, among other things. Even things I wasn't even sure would be possible I decided to look into and develop such as adding video calls.

I'm proud of my website, my product, that I have developed. If it doesn't work out then I just have to learn from it. But I still have a chance to make it succeed and with that, I'm going to keep at it.