Ask HN: Good feature, minimal product. Go forward or move on to something else?

I'm interested in local search, specifically in terms of time. Yelp and Citysearch are great at telling you about businesses you've never tried, but if you want to find out when a given business is open it's pretty hit or miss. Those sites usually list business hours for the trendy restaurant across town, but when it comes to the small market down the corner you're on your own. If you're like me, even though you've been to that market ten times you still can't remember if it closes at 10:30 or 11:00. But you're hungry, so you walk 10 minutes to get there anyway. And of course it's closed. It'll take another 10 minutes to walk back home and you're still hungry.

It's annoying, it's a big waste of time, and it's a problem I've always wanted some local search tool to solve. Like Yelp, Google and other major search engines are only helpful some of the time. A lot of small players have tried to take on the problem, but most have been hamstrung by data that's woefully incomplete or just plain bad. It's a pretty hard nut to crack, in large part because half of the restaurants in a typical city don't even have a website. Data collection is a complete pain in the ass.

Still, I've created something that solves the problem really well. It only covers about a third of one large city as a proof of concept, but it's really helpful. Looking for beer at 3:00 in the morning? Wondering when the DMV office opens? Searching for one of the three places in town that actually serves teriyaki on a Sunday? This app can tell you all of that. If a business isn't open, it'll tell you about similar ones in the area that are. It's just a click to read reviews of the place on sites like Yelp and Citysearch, get directions, etc. It's exactly the product I've always wanted someone else to create.

But that's the rub: it's not really a product; it's just a feature. I'd love to refine the thing, gather loads of information, and roll it out in major cities across the country. It's perfect for a mobile application. It's easy enough for anyone to understand and comprehensive enough for anyone to get value from. But once the data's out there, it'd also be incredibly easy to recreate. There's a definitive first mover advantage, but it would only go so far. This is all a big concern for me; even though I know that a lot of people would use the app and enjoy it, generating revenue is important. Solving this problem on a large scale will require several years of hard work on my part, so there needs to be some sort of sustainable path to get there.

Assume you're in my position. What do you do? Is there some way to build a product around the feature and create a company with a chance at making money? Or do you leave it to an established business with more resources to add the feature to an existing product?