I wish articles like this would more seriously engage with the possible value of First Mover Advantage in certain circumstances and industries. You can do this while recognizing that implementation is key.
I will try to find the quote.
EDIT: found it in “Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0”, great book btw. Highly recommended
> Where does this leave us with respect to a market pioneer strategy versus a market follower strategy? It’s clear that there are advantages to being a market leader. You can lock up customers. You can build early market share and gain a dominant trade name. You can get down the learning curve. You can sometimes gain patent protection. You can benefit from high margins, and use the resulting cash flow to fund further product development and marketing.
But—and this is key—taking a market pioneer strategy is not, in itself, enough. Being first will not protect you forever; you also have to execute well.
Of course, the ideal position—and the one pursued by many great companies—is to strive for being both first and best.
The sales guy said : yeah, but I don't know where the market is, how big it is or how much I can charge.
Disclaimer : these are my words.
One, first mover advantages rarely determine winners. Google followed altavista. FB followed Myspace. iphone followed N95s, palm pilot, blackberry, etc. Those earlier versions also had precedents, and for each precedent there are hundreds of attempts at creating commercial products.
Second, timescales. The above examples are years and decades. The typical founder pushing NDAs on everyone and their cat is thinking in months. There are almost no cases where someone is going to entrench themselves in an industry or create network effect in months. If they do, it's probably down to great execution anyway.
It's not that first mover advantage doesn't exist, it's just a smaller factor relative to execution. Competition generally, is unlikely to be a major factor. Also "major" and "minor" are a different sort of beast for a startup. Statistically, a startup has a very low chance of success. Say the chance of success is 5%. You can think of that as 50% chance of not being executed at all. 30% chance of being executed poorly. 10% chance of failing to appeal to customers/users. 2% chance of dying because of founder disputes. 1% chance of being a stupid idea. 0.5% chance of being killed by competition. etc.
In any case, we are engaging with the idea right now. This article didn't "engage" in the sense that it doesn't mention it, but you can't expect every article to mention it. I also don't think it's very important, as a consideration.
Engage seems euphemistic to me. What do you mean by it.. that people should rank it more highly as a factor? If so, why not make that case?
This implies you are moving. If your idea is still on idea stage, you are not being first mover. You are a dreamer.
Most of the time First Mover Advantage becomes obvious only after the fact. So I would not loose too much sleep over it.