[adrianbooth17]

There are two reasons for building something: 1. Money 2. Fun / Learning

Both have good reason for building something even though a similar product might exist. Mark Zuckerberg didn't look at MySpace and say "Oh well, there's already a social network where people can connect with each other. I'll stay in Harvard". He saw MySpace and said "I can do better".

For the learning side, it's useful to build something despite its existence for gaining a greater appreciation for how that tool works. There's a service I've used before called Cloud66, which is essentially a wrapper for cloud services like AWS. I liked it so much I decided to build a clone just to see how it all works under the hood, and after replicating it I realised the underlying technologies used to achieve this are pretty simple. There's always good outcomes from building something, whether that be money, learning or just the joy of building something from nothing