How to Always Be the First, and Why It’s Absolutely Critical
Most of the time, it’s not enough to be the best. To be a market leader, you have to be first.
Look at Netflix and Blockbuster. Blockbuster offers a cheaper, comparable service and allows you to take movies home from their physical locations, in addition to millions spent on advertising, yet it still has less than a third of the market share. Wal-Mart tried to enter the arena, and crashed and burned - never making it above 2.6% market share.
Basic econ claims people would switch, but the risk of switching to another service that they think they’d have to learn how to use isn’t worth the $2 per month they’d be paying. If it even costs them one hour to cancel Netflix, set up a Blockbuster account, and learn the new system, that costs the average person $20 - it would take almost a year to recoup those benefits.
So how do you break people out of the mindset that “even though my service isn’t the best, it’s good enough that I won’t waste time switching”? Make your service the first - by creating a new category that didn’t exist before.
If you’re in your own category, you’ll have no competition, but how exactly do you break out and make a brand new sector? Take something that’s unique about your site, and tout it everywhere - exaggerate its significance on the site. Don’t label yourself as part of the crowd you’re like, but do label the new category.
Look at Digg. At its most basic level, it’s people voting for content. This idea isn’t new. Digg’s new features were:
1) Socialization. It got implemented at the right time, and it caught on.
2) The time-based algorithm. Votes were not counted equally, but rather based on how frequently they were coming in, hence allowing for an automated and real-time system.
Then look at Coca-Cola and Pepsi - who’s to say one product is better than another? Both have their fans, but Coca-Cola came first, and so people still trust and like it more.
Here’s another: Google. It wasn’t the first search engine. It was the first search engine to use backlinks as a criterion. Yahoo! was already a search engine, but not in Google’s “new” category, and as a result, it’s still struggling to catch up (although it never will until it breaks into completely new territory - fact).
So to sum it up: Take your most unique asset or assets (focus on one or two), and advertise it/them as much as possible. Base a new “category” around it. Reap the rewards of no competition.
If you don’t have a unique asset, then you’ll never break out. Sorry.
Sidenote: “AJAX” is NOT a unique asset.
