First to market” has become a pseudo-religious mantra in tech, but it's built on a fallacy...
- Apple launched the iPod 7 years after the first portable mp3 player was commercialized...
- Keurig Green Mountain, Inc. was the 5th single-serve coffee brewing system...
- Facebook only launched after Friendster and MySpace had begun connecting people online...
The illusion of the need to be first to market prevents numerous businesses from prioritizing the actual key factor - being best to market.
This means being the best answer to a problem your target customers share.
“The category leader stays in their position as long as the world agrees with their definition of the problem and the solution.” - Christopher Lochhead🏴☠️
It's not the first product or the product with the best specs that wins, it's the companies who design their story around a clear customer problem (category design), ingest the solving of that problem, and the story as the reason they exist (crafting a point of view), and equip those in the industry to share that story amongst themselves (languaging).
Stop challenging the existing competition in your market, start challenging the market to think about their problem differently.
That's what winners do...
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