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Ask HN: Does it matter to be the first on the market?
81 points by bobnarizes on Nov 24, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 63 comments
I need an urgent advise from all product creators/designers/engineers/entrepreneurs! Just a few hours ago, I found out that the project that I was working on really hard for the last 6 months exists for a few days already on Kickstarter. It's exactly the same idea, exactly the same product. This is not the first time that something like this happened to me.

1) Did something like this happen to you before, what did you do? It is really frustrating...

2) What would you do?

3) Continue working on it or throw everything in the trash and focus on new things?

4) Is there anything I can do to avoid this?




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.


> If you seriously invested 6 months already, stop everything and ship it in the next 5 days

In particular, keep in mind that a project going through Kickstarter now will likely not ship for at least 6 months, if not a year or two. (Some exceptions exist, such as products that have already done the work and just need to scale, but even then they usually take months after funding completes to sort out the logistics.)

So if you can ship within a week or so, long before the project finishes funding, you'll take advantage of the interest.

Your other alternative would be to decide that you care more about seeing the idea succeed than you do about winning by yourself. You could contact the Kickstarter project team, tell them that you've been working on this for six months, and tell them you'd like to join forces to bring a product to market faster. If they're just raising funds and don't already have the details worked out that you have, they'll likely welcome the help, and you might welcome the funding, interest, and marketing.


> In particular, keep in mind that a project going through Kickstarter now will likely not ship for at least 6 months, if not a year or two

Let's face it, never is also high on the probability scale.


Especially when the competitors on Kickstarter are demoralized by learning about competing product already entering market and starting incremental updates.


Agreed, but the probability of not shipping at all is high for any startup.


Would you have any recommendations for resources that an engineer who has no idea about marketing can use to learn how go about marketing a product?


Some useful resources: https://www.devmarketingguide.com/

There is also an edX course for this @ https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-marketing-ubcx-marke...


Yes, go out and have a coffee with every business owner you can find! Hairdressers, Accountants, Financial Advisers - ask them what they did!

Go find a business coach! Look at their marketing, pay attention to what marketing works for you.

Check out Mixergy[0]. They will definately have something for you. Listen to the interview on Mafia Wars[1].

[0] https://mixergy.com [1] https://mixergy.com/interviews/roger-dickey-mafia-wars-inter...


If you want an absolute starter guide, I wrote one: https://quicknotes.io/n/wrWe-a-short-guide-to-marketing-for-...


as a web developer i can recommend this course by Justin Jackson. http://devmarketing.xyz


1 & 2) I crashed the market but only after the other guy had soften clients into the service. I sold it at a price level where competition couldn’t keep up. It didn’t really hurt me in the long term although it changed my plans short term.

3) So what, every time you face completion you’ll just run away? You have a six months head start. Work on it. He’s doing the marketing with that Kickstarter campaign, you ship the product.

4) You make it sound like it’s your fault that competition caught up. Either you think that someone stole your idea, or you need a reality check (no pun intended). Competition would occur anytime, you may think that it’s bad it happened before launching but it could be equally bad if a year from now someone with deep pockets took an aim at your market. Bottom line, competition is a given, learn to live with that. Use it to make your product better.


1) is a famous tried and tested Sega/Sony $299 strategy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExaAYIKsDBI


I usually get the idea from the comments on HN that competing on price alone just doesn't work. Do you think that's a myth or did you have special case at hand?


I guess that depends on the amount of competitors. If there are a lot of companies offering the same product then lowering prices wouldn’t do you any good long term. If on the other hand you’re competing against one or two, then you could easily drive them off the market. The latter worked in my case, I was only competing against one guy and like the OP I had a head start. I had the luxury of selling too cheap because I’ve already invested the time and money into building the product. He hadn’t.


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


Dropbox and Youtube always spring to mind. There were Dropbox solutions for YEARS before they came around.

Even Microsoft had one (well before OneDrive) they gave away for free - still, Dropbox came to the top.

And Youtube and a bunch of clones.

Go back even further: MS Word - Wordperfect Excel - Lotus 123 Just about every dinky database - MS Access


Youtube in particular. I think it was about timing, broadband was just getting to the critical point where even grandma could watch videos. But people were trying to make youtube in the mid 90's.


also "isn't x doing the same thing" is a great thing! it means there's a market for some thing! if there's a market there may also be underserved demand.

if that's the case then you can clone an existing business and help increase supply to meet the demand.


Airbnb and Couchsurfing aren't the same thing, and it's not really fair to say that Airbnb beat them. They're for different kinds of people and the nature of "service" is different.


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


How can it be the exact same product when developed independently? Your product will fork away as you and your customers decide what is important just as they will.

Answers to your questions:

1) Yes. It happens to everyone. And you want it to happen because being first is very expensive. You have to educate the market place and that takes time and money. Plus if you were the first and started to succeed, do you think that other startups (or larger companies that smell an opportunity) wouldn't pour into that marketplace? That's the market-based system hard at work.

2) Joel Spolsky and a million others have said to ignore your competitors and concentrate on the customers. Nothing your competitors ever do will be as significant as just listening to the people who will ultimately use your product. So carry on. Mate, eventually you will have to deal with competitors so you might as well train your mind and your company to deal with this as early as possible.

3) That's ridiculous. If you are passionate about the idea then fight harder now.

4) Yes, you could create an economy where the first company with a particular idea gets a 17 year monopoly. Seriously, you fight because, eventually, if the idea is good and the market is large enough, the competitors will be flocking in. Learn to handle this now. You buckle down and work twice as hard.

You need to realise that nothing, and I mean nothing, gets done until you have customers. You think you've been working hard now but you haven't. Customers are the only difference between a startup and a successful business.

Overall, I think this will be a good thing for you. It's (bluntly) lit a fire under your ass and will make you re-assess your plans to create a more customer-centric plan. Good luck.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


You can't really count Orkut, it was a Googler's 20% project without anything like the resources or management support that G+ had.

It also wasn't at all "Googley". I wasn't at all surprised it was left to wither and die on the vine.


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 :)


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.


> There is a strategy called fast follower where you run behind a competitor (first mover) waiting for them to trip up.

And its not a bad strategy to adhere to either.

Here's a good article championing "fast follower" over "first mover" http://www.businessinsider.com/youre-better-off-being-a-fast...


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.


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.


Same thoughts here.

Doing it alone has its pros for sure, but finding another person that is into the same thing seems very valuable as well. Also, if you merge, both of you will be stronger and each of you will have one competitor less.

I guess it all comes down to what role the startup is playing in your life.


Why would the other team consider cutting someone else in when they had already gotten so far?


If bringing someone else in increases the chance of their success by more than the cost of paying that person then it's a net gain. It's why businesses employ people, investments get made, and deals happen.


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.


It's not all just about the product. I recommend you read The Discipline of Market Leaders. That book does a good job of explaining how there are many different factors you can choose to compete on.


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.


Get the product out the door before the Kickstarter gets funded or ships, and you should be OK. Most Kickstarters don't happen. Even some that are heavily funded don't ship.

Look at "Coolest Cooler". $13,285,226 pledged of $50,000 goal, 62,642 backers, announced in 2014, the price has climbed from $100 to $400, and they still haven't shipped all the backer units. Even on simple products with heavy funding, the execution can be botched.


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.


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.


They may never get funded, and if you stop because of them well you just wasted time you could have been spending polishing your product. Polish your branding. Continue working on it. You can't avoid someone coming up with a clone product, but you can create a better product. Chances are a person who clones an idea is in for a easy buck and will not put the necessary time and effort to produce a high quality product. They will not put the energy into customer service that you will. Make sure your customers know that you stand by your product, and that you will be available to them long after the product has shipped.


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.


My perspective as a VC: if you're building exactly the same product then that sucks. You'll only be able to compete on price, and that's not a good outcome. Execution is important, but that's more clear after launch, once people try out both products, write reviews, etc.

However, having a competitor launch just before you gives the advantage of seeing their messaging, seeing how people react to it (esp. in the comments section and in how quickly/slowly the project gets funded), and might give you ideas for how to better differentiate. If you do a good job with that differentiation then your competitor will educate the market while you get people excited by releasing something that's better in some key way. The differentiation could be in your product, your messaging, how you package or bundle your product, etc.

You shouldn't throw 6 months of work away. You can think of what you've built as no better than the competition, or you can think of it as 90% of the way to being a lot better than the competition. I think the second mindset is more constructive.


1) Yes, a couple of times. But in the long run, we were so much better for it.

(For me at least!) I overestimated how obvious my product idea was. You see this all the time! The marketing effort becomes two-fold. You have this pain point (or opportunity), and here's a product that solves that pain point.

By being 2nd / 3rd / etc. the 1st person has already educated the potential client

2) Pay real attention to what the 1st to market was doing well. Can you copy / replicate it? Be aware of your mindset. Is this really a "winner takes all" situation? Or is there room for the both of you?

3) Why are you doing this? Is it to make a bazillion dollars? Or something more satisfying? Plenty of businesses (Stackoverflow, 37 Signals) have a certain "quality of life" - clearly they enjoy doing what they do. Why are you doing this?

4) Are you really really sure this is a bad thing? How many businesses can you think of that did fantastic from Kickstarter?

Compare that to how many Kickstarters were... less than successful?


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.


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


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.


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.


Are you sure it's exactly the same idea and exactly the same product as you say? Sometimes it can seem like that because there's a lot of overlap but it's hard to end up creating something that is exactly the same as something else independently. Isolate features and the ways that you are doing things that may be different and focus on why there are differences. Perhaps yours is more convenient or easier, or provides some unexpected benefit the other one doesn't.


The only time first matters is in patent filing. If your product is patentable, you should probably file (or publish) as soon as you can, so you don't have to fight someone else's patent later.

Other than that, I can't think of any current large successful businesses that were first to market. It's usually much easier to build something you know can be built (because it's in the market), especially because you can see which parts are important and need more focus.


It really depends on how trivial the idea is and if there are any significant difficulties with implementation.

If it's something simple and easy to replicate, then those with better marketing will win. But if it's a technically hard product, then it comes down to execution.

In either case being first to the market matters only if you have a trully innovative idea with immediate mass appeal.


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


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.


happened to me before, and it rocked me because i had finally found and started to implement an idea of mine that i thought was really what had passion for, and i thiught it was unique. later on i found that there was something similar, but not exactly the same, and it depressed and destroyed my motivation all in one fell swoop because this company had been around for 2 years already in the market, but after awhile, i realized that this is not necessarily a bad thing, it totally validates that there's a market for this, so i got back on my proverbial horse and started back on my passion wave!

look at the iphone, at the time blackberry and nokia were in the market for years and dominant players, did it mean that they should give up? granted apple had the funds and resources to go big on iphone, but you're up against a kickstarter product, not exactly rim or nokia of that time :)


I'd be more worried if there wasn't anyone else doing it. That probably means that other people tried and failed and there's something very tricky about this idea or market that makes it hard to do.

You will always have competition. Uniqueness is not required for hairdressers, why is it required for startups?


Implementation is everything. Many years ago I was first to market with what are now called Intelligent Lights (moving stage lights). We were incredibly naive and under-funded and got blown out of the water by Vari*lite (funded by the band Genesis).

So, no, you don't have to give up: just do it better.


Deliver better. Success comes in execution, not idea.

Also, first movers don't always win, because second movers can learn without maintaining legacy.

Who would you rather be? MySpace or Facebook? Alta Vista or Google? ICQ or Skype?


Digg came out before Reddit, look who came out ahead. Being first gives you an initial boost, but what really will matter is who has the better product, and who markets those advantages better.


Launch first if possible. If you don't then there's still other ways to position your product.

Read: Positioning by Al Ries. Oldie but goldie.

Good luck.


The existence of competition can be a very good validator for the idea. The further along the competition, the stronger the validation.


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


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




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