The first-to-market myth | Hacker News Reader

The first-to-market myth

37signals.com

12 pointsmattjung4 comments

Three paragraphs are several orders of magnitude too few for a serious treatment of the economics of these things. Italian restaurants have vastly different economics than, say, search engines or auction sites or bug trackers, or, for that matter, furniture makers.

It depends on the market you're in, its reach (Italian restaurants do not compete with other restaurants 1000's of kilometers away; craigslist does), network externalities and their strength in the market (they were right to say bug trackers don't have really strong network effects), switching costs and so on and so forth.

Is this really a myth? Being the first means confronting different challenges than being niche or disrupting an existing market - like creating and educating the market. The most important point in this discussion is to be aware of the impact of being the first (if it is really true) and developing the appropriate marketing strategy.

Doesn't everyone know this already anyway? Windows wasn't the first operating system. Firefox wasn't the first browser, neither was Internet Explorer. Google wasn't the first search engine. Apple didn't make the first MP3 player or smart phone. Facebook wasn't the first social networking site. Wikipedia wasn't the first online encyclopedia.

If you think you need to be first-to-market, then you know what you haven't isn't that great and you're just banking on novelty. "Build a better mousetrap" blah blah blah.

The argument has been proven many times that first to market success never compares to those who enter the market later.

Apple has modeled their entire business this way practically since the return of Steve Jobs, if no a little after.

iPod - not first to market (mp3 players already existed) iPhone - not first to market (smartphones already existed) iTunes - not the first to market (other miserable music services were already around, just didn't have great pay-for content and they were competing very heavily with piracy) Retail - not the first to make a brand store, but first to be successful in tech to do this

I hate always referring to Apple in business discussion, but there aren't many out there that have done this repeatedly.

How about "social web"? Twitter and Facebook, definitely not the first to market.

I'm not sure how this article/post hit front page, as many have already stated here in the comments.

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