Ask HN: Can first to market do more harm than good?

Hello,

Here's a story: I came out publicly with a project I had been working on for a long time. I figured, if I don't release it now it will never see the light of day. Sad to say I feel like what I ended up releasing was an unfinished, unpolished product.

Fast forward three years later: The project has seen considerable progress in a lot of areas. Despite this people show hardly any interest at all and probably associate the name with bugs and/or failure.

Should first impression weigh more heavily over first to market?

4 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 21.1 ms ] thread

calcsam 10y ago ↗

"probably associate"

Speculation. Have you confirmed this?

If the product has seen little usage & people show little interest, there are two possibilities (1) you aren't solving a real problem people have (2) you aren't marketing it well enough.

JacobAldridge 10y ago ↗

Being the first isn't always an advantage - there's a nice Harvard Business Review research piece [1] into this. They broke innovation down into 'Market Led', where you create a solution the market wants/needs, and 'Technology Led', where your innovation is novel but the customer needs to be educated. The First Mover Advantage only applied in Market Led situations - for Technology Led solutions, the first mover had to invest heavily in educating the market which subsequent competitors benefited from (without having to make that investment themselves).

Applying this to your bugs and first impression: I would posit that if your product clearly met a market need, some customers would have been willing to work around those issues. If not, then you were educating/convincing them that this innovation was worthwhile and their lack of desire would have made your flaws harder to work around.

Reid Hoffman's great quote was that if you're not embarrassed by your first product version then you launched too late. What I would focus on is whether your potential customers are super clear about the problem they have, and whether you are super clear about how you solve that problem. If it's not a massive need for the market, that's ok, just be aware that your rollout process will take longer and cost more as you invest in educating them. Good luck!

[1] https://hbr.org/2005/04/the-half-truth-of-first-mover-advant...

LarryMade2 10y ago ↗

All subjective - I'm sure we could show examples of where first to market trumps and where first to market being just a good beta to some later follower.

Then again sometimes first to market may not necessarily be a good thing, but due to it's popularity catches on anyway (nuclear fission power plants) Or in some cases first to market was too early for market.

On your effort - One advantage of first to market is while others are playing catch up you can be working on next generation - you already have the product skill, and also the opportunity to improve.

iSloth 10y ago ↗

I could probably find a raft of examples for either side, so I really don't think it matters, in my opinion.

Someone entering a market after the first is going to look at the competition and try improve and create something more unique, if they win it'll be because they actually made something that's significantly better. And generally that improve the is going to be feature/design based rather than stability/performance etc...

I personally think first to market business can sometimes get a bit complacent, you always need to understand are people buying your product because it's the best, or simply because it's the only one. If it's the latter then you need to constantly innovate and improve, or someone else will.

The advantage of second to market is, a lot of your market research is already done...