Ask HN: Does bootstrapping a clone within an established market make sense?

Fresh account here created to ask this question. I'm in my late thirties and I spent my entire career at tech startups (as founder or employee up to CTO and VP Product positions). I never scored really big, but I earned well. I'm currently free to start something new and I might look for a new job as tech or product lead, but I'm also entertaining a thought of launching a SaaS business.

I don't have a groundbreaking or innovative idea, but I'm great at execution. I'm more than happy to bootstrap something small, without ever taking outside capital, a company which will never grow over few dozen employees. I'm looking for a quite likely path to build a $5-25M company rather than a quite unlikely path to build a $100M-1B company (the latter seems to be the dominating goal in startup community).

Considering the above, can creating a clone within an established area be the way to go? Something like another website monitoring service, another ticket system or another ecommerce CRM. None of these is actually something I want to pursue, but you can get the idea.

I understand that building a product is just the beginning and that much more effort is required into marketing and sales and I'm prepared for that (I know that underestimating it is a common mistake made by techies wanting to launch their own business), but they are also the areas I'm least experienced (although not totally inexperienced), so I'm unsure if this is a good idea.

I would love your opinions on whether what I want to do is viable. Or should I forget it because I will just do better by launching a software house or by creating an offshore development center for some US/EU company (I'm from the Central/Eastern Europe so it's the best place for this considering talent/culture/salaries mix)? Let me know what do you think or share your experiences if you've done or tried the same. Thanks!