I have been working on an idea partially for about 2 years while I’ve been in school. Right now I am deciding if I should just drop it. From what I’ve been seeing in the market, there are a few companies that have been around for many years. So I doubt I could compete with them. The core thing about my product which I really truly believe in and see that the market needs (helping parents find things to sign their kids up for) and no other product really offers, is extremely dependent on getting lots of users at some point. There is one company that is pretty similar to the idea but they failed on the one feature I am doing. If my product is dependent on competing with these other companies in order to get users to power the main service, is it even worth it? Id be able to provide the service for free which no other company can do.
Sounds like the problem you need to solve is being “…extremely dependent on getting lots of users…”
I’m assuming you’re trying to build a marketplace. Do not build a marketplace. Instead, just serve user needs. One. At. A. Time.
Then go from there. If a marketplace emerges organically, cool. Otherwise, prepare to manually curate and promote.
Many marketplace apps fail cause they think they need to get a bunch of user generated content to make the market place feel alive. They often under invest in native content, manual content.
Read up on the early days of AirBnB. The company themselves realized the listings needed better photos so they went door to door to photograph the listings themselves. Even today, AirBnB invest directly in featured listings. They build houses in some cases.
GOAT famously manually created their early sneaker deal listings and still do a huge amount of curation.