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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately being first to market is key (I think)

No knowing the first thing about your product or market, I'll still go out on a limb and propose that you're most likely wrong. If I had a nickel for every time I thought something was absolutely key, and it turned out to be a wrong assumption - well, I could probably buy a Starbucks latte.

Hey, by all means, work hard, push forward and do awesome stuff and win, I'm all for that - but don't lie to yourself, especially not if it's impacting your health and your family.

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The market is recruitment (in house and agencies) - and knowing the types of products they still use because it "works for them" and how hard it is to get them to change workflows etc; I believe early adoption will be key. Only time will tell I guess, I'll be sure to do a "Show HN" when I am done!

Recruitment has been around for years, including over the internet. Given that you're talking about workflow it sounds more like a regular LOB application; that's far more likely to be a question of getting sales one-by-one in a high-touch way rather than the first person to launch something getting millions of users.

Ok, so I'm confident in declaring your assumption false. This isn't a green-field market where the first credible entrant has a reasonable chance of capturing a large part in one go, it's a mature, slow and conservative market. They are extremely unlikely to read about a new shiny thing on a blog, decide that afternoon to start using it, and in that decision cut out the superior product that launches two months later.

Sure, by the time they've decided to use a new thing, they are unlikely to change again soon, and if, at the time some team is evaluating a new system yours isn't on the market, you wont be considered.

So take a deep breath, stop sweating "first to market" startup tropes, build a good product and start thinking about how you're going to sell into this market instead that's probably a much bigger challenge than building the product in the first place.

Having sold a product to the recruitment market for a while I can wholeheartedly confirm this.

There's no first mover advantage here; there's only a "most able to convince people to switch from 90's tech to 00's tech"-advantage.

FWIW We sold video interviewing software and decided to abandon recruitment because the market had low requirements for software quality / innovativeness and high requirements for stability and track records; which was the polar opposite of what we offered.

Additionally; ATS integration was paramount for all large players. ATS providers knew that and charged for it at levels only heavily funded companies could afford.

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