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Comment by misiti3780 | Hacker News Reader

I just finished "The Originals" and he basically has a whole chapter on how first movers advantage is bullshit.

Taken from the book:

* Studies show this does not exist

* Since market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place

* Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they're prone to impulsive decisions. Risk-adverse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering.

* Failure rates aof 47%/8% (first movers / settlers)

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Case in point: Google was not a first mover. More like 21st.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine

Facebook too

But Google was the first mover with its way of sorting the data from web pages, by building PageRank.

> But Google was the first mover with its way of sorting the data from web pages, by building PageRank.

That was better execution

>> Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they're prone to impulsive decisions. Risk-adverse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering.

SO much wisdom in this. It's actually really smart to see a company jump into a market, make several failures and then you can slide in without having to take the amount of risk the "first to market" companies had to take.

Tons of real world examples. The most obvious is how Apple iphones were designed and then copied by the rest of the industry. Samsung, et al allowed Apple to define what users wanted, then piggy backed their design to take advantage of the popularity of their design without sacrificing the risk to find out for themselves, or develop something cough original cough.

You can also view it the other way around. Phones and MP3 players existed before the iPhone and iPod, and Apple learned from others' attempts.

The Nokia N95 was VERY similar to first iPhones. Heck, Steve Jobs is even quoted (quoting Picasso) as saying "Good artists copy; great artists steal"[1]

[1] https://www.cnet.com/au/news/what-steve-jobs-really-meant-wh...

I haven't read the book, but from my experience I have found that truly new ideas/products are much harder to explain (I have tried a couple). If someone is already using a competing or similar product then you can say it is like X but here is how we are different/better. If you are the first mover, then you have to explain what X is, why X is useful, and why they should pay for X. Being a first mover is also riskier because there isn't proof that there is a market yet.

yep, this is the "second-mover advantage." It doesn't always outweigh the first-mover advantage (especially where network effects exist), but it can in some cases.

This is why the whole startup space drives me mad!

You can do a whole lot of naval gazing, and then what are you left with?

First movers are hard, because (as you've described) you have to educate the market, and then give a reason to buy.

Think about the marketing effort of Lotus-123 vs Excel.

Or Twitter vs Facebook

Or Dwarf Fortress vs Minecraft

This is why I think Scott Adam's book "How to fail at almost everything and still win big" is brilliant. He suggests focusing on the process (get the process right) and the goal will look after itself

Who wrote "the originals"? Google only seems to know about a Vampire series of that name.

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=ori...

Thanks. So it's called "Originals", not "the originals" as misiti wrote.

my bad!

That makes sense. Thanks for sharing

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