Being first to market doesn't guarantee success. First-movers pay high costs to educate customers and build trust, while later entrants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon won by being better solutions. Nokia and Kodak were first but lost to competitors who came after.
Chapters
Being first to your market isn't enough. Google wasn't the first search engine. Facebook wasn't the first social network. Amazon wasn't the first online bookstore. Being first is expensive. Educating a new market is expensive. Setting up production for a new product at scale is expensive. Selling products or services that people don't trust or understand is expensive. Selling a novel kind of product or service requires the first mover to make significant efforts on educating their target audience. Why customers should want or need it, and what problem it solves. What inevitably happens is once you've spent all that time and money educating your market, someone else bigger and better swoops in. Don't think it can happen to you? That's what Nokia thought. So did Kodak. It's not about being first to market, it's about being best to market.