
Ask HN: Can first to market do more harm than good? - techthroway443
Hello,<p>Here&#x27;s a story: I came out publicly with a project I had been working on for a long time. I figured, if I don&#x27;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.<p>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&#x2F;or failure.<p>Should first impression weigh more heavily over first to market?
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calcsam
"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.

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JacobAldridge
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...](https://hbr.org/2005/04/the-half-truth-of-first-mover-advantage)

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iSloth
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...

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LarryMade2
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.

