@Lei I see we both have a connection at ASU. :-)
I wanted to jump in on this and offer some perspective. With my last business when Facebook started getting very popular with businesses & I was working with a lot of eCommerce clients helping them with their digital marketing I saw a huge opportunity to be the 1st company to come out with a social commerce app on Facebook with the goal that in minutes an eCommerce company could build their shop on a tab on their Facebook page fast, cheap and results oriented.
We called it ShopTab and for about 6 months I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into trying to be "1st" to market. Of course, literally a week before our beta launch a huge competitor came out that had $3.5 million in funding and we bootstrapped this baby.
Sure at first I was discouraged but then as @Eric Sexton stated, it was a huge opportunity. We slowed down our launch, monitored them very closely for about 30 days and then we pivoted our business to focus on the areas they were weak on. We were not 1st to market, not never the #1 but we were definitely in the top of the pack and got customers like Coca Cola and Barneys NY to use our App over the top competitor.
As Eric said, take this as an opportunity to look at what they came up with and make your solution better. I always tell entrepreneurs that I consult that if they think they are 1st to market with an hour and the help of Google I will find someone out there that has started up something similar so its quite hard to be 1st and from my experience it does not matter anymore. Just be different and better! Even being #2 our business did very well (still is) & I was able to sell it a few years ago so I can focus on my current business.