Ask HN: Does it matter to be the first on the market?

The fact that someone else is working on the same product tells you that you're not the only person who thinks there's a market for this product. That's probably useful to know - it validates your idea.

Many of the most successful products today were not the first in their market: Google wasn't the first search engine, Facebook wasn't the first social network, the iPhone wasn't the first smart phone, etc. They succeeded because of innovative features and business skills, not because they were first to market.

Not necessarily.

There is even an argument that you want to be "the last" on the market.

For example, Google is the last "search engine" - it wasn't the first search engine on the market but it did grow to dominate the market when it arrived.

Keep working on it. You have an advantage of being able to address the weakness of your competitor. In fact I started my SaaS business, Cronitor, because I was unhappy with the incumbent.

If you'll excuse the cliche: pioneers take the arrows, settlers take the land.

Finally, six months of hard work and nothing is shipped? This is your answer to #4. Ship early and often. Six months is an incredible investment without feedback from users.

Idea might be the same. But execution is the one that really matters. Make a list of features. Really think if you need to implement all of those features right away. Prioritize by feature importance. If your execution is better than anyone else's, your product would be the one on top on areas where both products exists. Pricing would also matter.

Many of my ideas also existed when I first started to imagine solutions to different problems. But I realized execution really matters.

Take example of google search, macintosh etc. Search and personal computers did exist before those. Similarly PC market is over crowded. Product quality and experience matters a lot.

Keep building. It would be an experience. As long as you have one or more strong features that gives your product strong advantage you are in the good.

Take a look at this:

- Friendster

- Myspace

- orkut

- Lycos

- Altavista

What is common with all these above ? They were one of the first if not THE first to enter the market and they were all destroyed ultimately by facebook and google. If there is one evidence like this, then you can conclude that being first in the market is not everything. Mind you, these companies were no minnows during their time.

Let me say this. If your project fails, it will not be because you were second or last in the market. Most likely, it will be due to bad execution, unfit market, no validation, poor management, founder conflict, shitty product, no marketing and others.

that slight feeling of panic you have -- that is what running a business feels like, all the time, non-stop. what you choose to do with that feeling is up to you.

Idea is %5-10 most of the time. It's the execution which makes the difference. Ideas tend to popup at multiple places at the same time, since they are fed but other ideas and multiple people reach to the same conclusion with the same input.

Do you think they will execute better? What if both of you succeeds? Is the market big enough for multiple players? Do you really need more time to go to market? (6 months is quite long for an mvp)

Besides, why don't you tell us what you're working on? Do you think someone will copy it or something? If that's the case, maybe it's something easily implementable and that can also happen after your release as well. In that case, those guys on Kickstarter won't do any harm, this will be the nature of your market.

It matters to be the last one , not the first one.

Most of the time, as a rule of thumb, the third product in the same class will succeed more than the first or second.

Was Facebook the first social network? It ate Myspace for dinner, plus things like Orkut.

Shimano didn't invent derailleurs.

Google and Samsung didn't have the first touch screen smartphone.

If you seriously invested 6 months already, stop everything and ship it in the next 5 days Cut out anything/everything feature wise you had planned and focus on shipping, now. Competing products are offered all the time, everywhere you look. It's because there is a strong problem area and demand for them.

What makes them better/different or noticeable? Marketing. Take a look at the web hosting industry. There are literally thousands and thousands of web hosting companies all offering (nearly*) the same thing. They differentiate by reputation and marketing. Ask any small business owner if they have a website, then ask them have they heard of AWS? I bet they won't. They'll be use Joe Host down the street from him or GoDaddy or won't have a clue and they have a "web person" to take care of that.

A product idea only gets you so far. Now you need to master how to get people to find it, tell them they need it and get them to sign up by hopefully providing you their credit card for X service/product. Your journey is just starting.

To borrow a line from the rapper Drake, "It ain't about who did it first, its about who did it right."

Another possibility (I'm not suggesting anything) is to consider contacting the other project and seeing if it makes sense to both parties to join forces. You may each have strengths that complement each other.

There's another option. You could consider teaming up with the folks on kickstarter.

If I were trying to build a thing, and somebody told me: "hey, I've had the same idea as you did, and worked half a year on it", I'd be intrigued to learn from their experience, and maybe even consider some form of collaboration.

Justin Kan has this great quote: "Startups mostly don't compete against each other, they compete against no one giving a shit."

https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/614904706624720896

1. This happens all the time, the market is very efficient. If your idea has any merit there's almost always going to be a competitor near you.

But, as your business evolves, you'll move closer to some competitors and further from others. I think of it like ships sailing in the sea: you might be close to a competitor right now, but have very different trajectories (moving up vs. down on the pricing curve, expanding your product assortment horizontally versus vertically, focusing on different segments of the market, improving on different aspects of the product, etc).

2. One of your jobs is going to be to navigate that competitive landscape. It shouldn't necessarily keep you up at night, you need to focus on the problems in front of you instead of being constantly paranoid about competitors, but you do need to be strategic about where you steer your ship to stay differentiated.

Is the other product exactly the same? Could you differentiate on brand, focus on a different market niche, do it cheaper/better, have better design?

3. It depends on #2. If I could think of a way to differentiate and leap frog the first product, I would try that. If not, I'd probably launch it anyway if I've spent 6 months on it. What do you have to lose?

4. You can't avoid it altogether. There will always be competitors if you're creating something valuable, if not now then later. One of my friends runs a company that builds SaaS for janitorial quality control (a relatively niche market) and even he has competitors. Navigating the competitive landscape is just something you have to continuously do as a founder.

Execution is the key. There were lots of messengers before both Snapchat and WhatsApp, for example, yet they are now dominant. The idea is almost irrelevant, except that the product needs to be valuable to some group of people.

As others have said, launch now and see what happens. Don't assume that most of the market has seen your competitor simply because it is on Kickstarter and you have seen it. There are billions of people in the world, and probably at least millions of potential customers/users of your product. Most have neither seen the other product nor had a chance to decide that it is better than yours.

First of all, you wrote the other party has put it on Kickstarter. That doesn't mean the product exists yet. They are just announcing it. They might in fact never ship (this happened to countless Kickstarter projects). Announcements are so much easier than actually shipping product and making customers happy so I wouldn't be too concerned about timing right now.

To your questions:

1) Yes, but so what? They are probing the market for you and you get to enjoy free market research. If their KS succeeds then you know you're working on something valuable. If they fail, then either there's no demand for the product or they haven't executed well (which would be a chance for you to do better).

2) Sit back and enjoy the show. And keep working on your product. There's likely a lot of opportunity to differentiate down the road.

3) Continue and watch how their KS goes.

4) Of course not. But it's not necessarily a bad thing.

TL;DR No it doesn't matter, 99.9% of the time. Its all about execution. Most consumers will change to a more capable product if it's placed in front of them, it solves their problems better and the cost of switching is low.

We all think that we are special snowflakes and that our idea is unique. Unfortunately, there are probably tens or hundreds of other groups of people working on the same idea of yours, at this very moment. These guys launching on KS probably have been working way longer than you on this idea, maybe one or more years. Having competitors is a good sign vs. no competitors at all. Note here, profitable competitors is a good metric, not just KS campaigns!

1) Yes it happens all the time! Don't try to defend your idea with patents, try and build a better product and serve your customers better.

2) Don't get discouraged, instead take some time to reflect why you are doing this, how are you solving your customer's problems. Why is your solution better or how could it be better. Can you execute this project to the end? Have you talked to your users about their problems? Do they get excited when you tell them about your solution? Can you bootstrap your way to a campaign or even better, to some beta units? It's all about execution.

3) Not enough data to advice. Follow your gut feeling..

4) Nothing to do to avoid others doing it. Don't be defensive about it, embrace it and try and build a better product.

PS: Remember to have fun and enjoy your self (ZEN of business).

Hope this helps :)

Depends on if you're a product company or a technology company, I suspect.

I'm an armchair economist at most but generally having a market is not a negative sign.

My current startup has literally hundreds of competitors in a winner-takes-all market. I've also randomly run into a number of other people in SoCal who have tried to do what we're doing (and failed to get something the market—or they, themselves—actually wants to use).

It's a very simple concept, but as others have noted: execution is key. It's not the first product to market that wins, it's the first product that the market wants that wins.

There is a strategy called fast follower where you run behind a competitor (first mover) waiting for them to trip up. Quite often they do. You can learn from their mistakes, operate leaner, you take different risks, make different partnerships, etc.

Often the first mover advantage comes with a lot of pride leading to arrogance and them making unforced errors.

Keep your head and focus on execution, margin and survival. Who knows what the future holds.

I'm the lastest entrant in a very mature market and I'm cleaning up.

Focus on completing your product and launching it well. Focus on your plans, not theirs. The difference is continuous execution. e.g. Better marketing, keeping costs low, keeping quality high etc. As an fellow entrepreneur I get this feeling everytime we get new competition. You will get immune to this after you get through the first few.

Entrepreneurs often share startup ideas and hear, “Isn’t X doing the same thing?” This is actually the common case as only one company can claim the first-to-market mantle.

It’s natural to feel discouraged or wonder if the window of opportunity passed, but history has proven unequivocally: first-to-market guarantees nothing.

Never abandon an idea because competitors exist. Abandon an idea because it lacks meaningful differentiation, because no one wants it more than the alternatives.

Here are inspiring examples of companies and products that flourished despite entering the market after others:

Facebook > Myspace

Google > Alta Vista

Nike > Converse

iPhone > BlackBerry

Instagram > Hipstamatic

Airbnb > CouchSurfing

WhatsApp > SMSenger

Dropbox > FolderShare

Skype > Net2Phone

Zappos > Shoebuy

Gmail > Hotmail

YouTube > Metacafe

LinkedIn > Ryze

Tumblr > Xanga

Kickstarter > Indiegogo

I've had this happen twice.

The first time I gave up. In retrospect I'm thankful I did, because I later came to realize I wasn't a true believer in the idea. Although it was valid from a business perspective (as evidenced by the other people doing it), it wasn't anything that truly excited me. If you're trying to build something exceptional, being excited matters for both morale and creativity reasons.

Regardless, in retrospect the first idea still could have succeeded. The competition's execution, while initially virtually identical, significantly diverged later on.

The second time featured very similar initial execution, followed by a divergence so large that I don't even consider them competitors anymore. It's even happened a few more times on the same idea, and each time the end result is wild divergence. This is likely a result of the second idea being more complex.

The moral of the story is that you shouldn't worry about competitors, even if it looks like doom and gloom right now.

Divergence in execution is proportional to idea complexity. Unless the idea in question is dead simple with no conceivable variation, press on.

Even so, press on anyways if you're a strong believer and the idea excites you.

If you have considerable time invested but don't believe in a way that excites you: kick it out the door fast, throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.

Good luck.