Mind Readings: Why Being First Matters in Business Strategy

In today’s episode, we’re exploring the strategic importance of being first in business, particularly in the rapidly evolving world of AI. You’ll uncover why establishing early dominance can create a lasting competitive advantage, even if your product isn’t perfect. I’ll reveal the psychological principles behind customer habits and why breaking them can be incredibly challenging for competitors. Tune in to gain a strategic edge and learn how to leverage the power of being first in your own ventures!

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Machine-Generated Transcript

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Christopher Penn: In today’s episode, let’s talk a bit about business strategy, AI, of course, and being first.

Why do companies race to be first? It’s not just an ego thing, although sometimes it is an ego thing. Companies race to be first — for anything — because it’s very hard to break people out of habits once they have them. If someone has a habit that you establish, you have a defensible position. If another company is in the market, and they were first, you — and your product — have to be significantly better to convince people to change, to break people of the habits of the first product. You have to over-deliver on what has come before.

Think about all the things that are still in place that we just kind of —

Christopher Penn: — accept as “that’s the way things should be.” The Ford assembly line that set the standard for auto manufacturing is still in use today. Now there are more robots involved, but it’s still that general concept — it hasn’t gone away. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes set the standard for boxed breakfast cereals, and almost everything on the shelf is a conceptual derivative of that.

Yeah, there are, you know, colored marshmallows and stuff, or whatever, in them, but no one’s invented something that is so much better that people have stopped consuming breakfast cereal. That company was so first that they defined not just their niche, but they defined pretty much that industry.

With any of these, whether they’re still around today, in the world of AI, the reason we pay attention to companies like OpenAI isn’t because their products are the best — in fact, sometimes their products are downright disastrous. At the moment, though, their current generation models — they’re — they’re just —

Christopher Penn: — barely ahead of their competitors. Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini actually are ahead in terms of some features like context windows, although the GPT-4 Omni model is more capable, but just barely, if you read the leaderboards over on — on chatbot battleground. OpenAI used to have a commanding lead in the market. Now that gap has narrowed, but they were still first. Because they were first, they —

Christopher Penn: — set a lot of standards. Being first sets the standard. Being first sets expectations. Being first puts boundaries and definitions around something amorphous and undefined and gives people expectations — and helps people set expectations.

We like that as a species — as an animal set of animals, we like — we like definition, we like order. Our brains love predictability, absolutely love it.

Every product coming on the market that is a language model of some kind advertises that it is compatible with the OpenAI API standard — the ChatML standard. “Get ChatML templates and stuff — compatible” — because they were first, and there’s a lot of code out there that is written for ChatML and OpenAI’s API. So if you are building a product in the ecosystem, you’ve got to be compatible with that standard. There are variations, but those variations are pretty minor because —

Christopher Penn: — the competitors realize they have to adhere to that standard because the switching cost away from it isn’t worth it. Every vendor has to go, “Well, we have to be compatible, or else people will not use us because it’s too much pain for not significantly better gain.”

The key to remember here is, in terms of strategy, you have to be the first or the best. There are plenty of companies that, yes, they were first, and they failed to be good enough to set the standard, but, in general, the earlier you are, the better.

The best place to be is to be the one that defines the market, sets expectations, and controls the standards. So whatever your business is — whatever your product or service or company does — if you can be the first at that and be good enough, you will have a competitive advantage that is difficult to dislodge. If you are competing against such a company, you have your work cut out for you because you have got to be better by a substantial margin to convince people that switching is worth it.

So that’s going to do it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in! Talk to you soon. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already. If you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.
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Mind Readings: Why Being First Matters in Business Strategy

Machine-Generated Transcript

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