I saw it a lot in my 11years of staging the Kingston Beta Tech Startup Community event. In our startup pitch segment, entrepreneurs would boldly claim that their idea was the first of its kind to do this or that. They were depending on being the first, to be their most compelling unique selling point that would make them successful.
Nice out of ten times they were wrong.
The community of been-there, done-that, still-doing-it, entrepreneurs would be an excellent source of information of what came before them to quickly burst that ego bubble and hopefully go back to the drawing board to think differently. And we were gentle. But before these entrepreneurs even got to be pitching at Kingston Beta, they could have searched. Google is there and there is a search function on every social platform online. So why didn’t they use it?
You could easily say that they were being lazy or afraid. You decide.
My point is simply this. Google was not the first search engine. Facebook was not the first social network. They did their homework though, then became the best and most persistent in their game.
You can’t hope to win in business, by only being first to market with a product or service. You are not trying to win a perception game. The successful entrepreneurs who win…are the ones who have created what people want to pay for, and more times than not…that process is a marathon, not a sprint. It has to go beyond wanting to be first, it has to be more about desiring to be an entrepreneur who wants to build a business that lasts.
