Why it’s often better not to be first

Prefer to listen? You can find an audio version of this article in Episode 11 of the Product Nuggets podcast.

One day, you get excited about an idea. Maybe you've invested a bunch of time into researching it, working on it. You meet a friend or colleague and, hoping they will share your excitement to provide some validation, you tell them about your idea. Your friend does get excited, but not so much about inventiveness, but about already being familiar with the concept: "Oh so it's like that other thing I've seen on the internet the other day!" Then they go on to describe your idea back to you. And with that, deflated by the seeming lack of your own originality, you give up on your idea - kick it into the overflowing bin of great ideas somebody else beat you to.

Many of us may have had similar experiences, at work or elsewhere, which is a shame. Not just because the resulting disappointment may prevent us from soliciting feedback and sharing our work in the future, or reduce our willingness to invest energy in any new ideas, but because those ideas - despite their early competition - could have grown into something great.

I've seen this story play out over and over again. In tech, where genius founders and their tales of changing the world from a garage are far too idolised, it is especially prevalent to give up when a product idea seems too similar to something already in existence. However, by forcing yourself to only work on 'truly original' ideas, you dramatically limit your chances of success. Let me tell you, it needn't be that way. Here are a few reasons why.

Do you know what the first products were that started the businesses of Samsung, IKEA, and Levi's? They had nothing to do with electronics, furniture, or jeans. Samsung started as a logistics company, IKEA - while dealing in furniture - did not start with the flatpack concept that made it world-famous, and Levi's was a wholesaler of dried goods for a substantial part of its early days.

History shows us a neat thread between those companies' beginnings and their later successes, but I am willing to bet that their founders had no idea where they would eventually end up. They identified a problem, a market, a business plan, or whatever else got them started in a given area, and developed their businesses learning more and more about the space they operated in as they went along.

One often cited hallmark of promising projects or companies - startups in particular - is their moats. The barriers the competition has to overcome to pose a serious threat. And while it's true that a truly unique product can be one such moat, there are many others you can develop to secure your position in the market - expertise, brand, networks, intellectual property, a unique business plan and others, just to name a few. Depending on who you are and what you do, you can be your project's moat.

If you really want to - need to - be a household-name entrepreneur, this might already give you some consolation. But there are more paths to success. A myriad of businesses you have never heard of exist today which are major players in their markets and are incredibly successful in their own right. Not all success plays out in the popular consumer market (most doesn't) and not all of it is built on truly original product ideas.

Working on a truly new idea can really be a barrier to success. In fact, my investor friends view first-movers as too risky to invest in. If a similar idea already exists as a business, this can serve as validation telling you that there really might be potential in a given space. As long as the market hasn't reached saturation or is in decline, there may be space for you to enter it - even if your idea was near identical to another - at least at first sight. Besides, if the problem we are looking to solve with our product still exists despite what we may feel an adequate solution already being there, doesn't that mean that solution wasn't all that adequate after all, or - at the very least - failed to reach its target audience in the right way?

In the arts it is widely accepted that practically no idea is truly original. Everything is a mash-up of what has come before. Every artist is influenced by what they have been exposed to. Why should tech be any different? We also don't live in a bubble so that ideas that are being worked on today may end up influencing each other - incorporating each other - in ways we can not anticipate today.

The next time you're excited about a project and get deflated by seeing what you believe is your idea out in the wild, don't be down. Instead, try to understand what the existence of this other thing implies for your work and how you might be able to actually benefit from it. You may or may not be the next Stave Jobs, but you can definitely still find success.