FOMO is silly. It’s a tactic used by many businesses to sell you more stuff, but it’s gimmicky.

It’s done entrepreneurship a real disservice, too.

FOMO works by creating urgency. It does so by emphasizing the negative potential outcome of non-action. By definition, it creates fear. Anxiety. Panic.

Over time, it started to define the literature around entrepreneurship. Concepts like “blitzscaling” and “winner-takes-all” have become gospel.

But history doesn’t corroborate this story.

Sure, speed-to-market can be helpful inasmuch as it grants you a first-mover advantage. But it isn’t necessary. You don't need to be first to win. You need to be last.

Rather, you need to focus on becoming the last mover in your market.

Your clients expect more than content - they expect an experience.

Join 7-figure business coach and former IBM marketing executive, Julie Ciardi, for a free workshop on how she scaled her coaching business to $3M by prioritizing a premium client experience on Kajabi.

Julie will show how combining courses, coaching and her community into one branded hub creates a cohesive experience that boosts engagement, increases loyalty, and drives long-term revenue, all powered by Kajabi’s full suite.

Despite what hustle culture wants you to think, being first is not the same as winning. 

In a study of 50 product categories, market “pioneers” (those who were first) had a 47% failure rate and only 11% are still category leaders. In fact, the eventual winners tended to show up more than a decade later.

Let me show you three teensy-tiny companies that proved the first-mover advantage is overrated.

By the late 1990s, web search was crowded. Yahoo, AltaVista, and Lycos dominated.

Yahoo started in 1994. AltaVista in 1995. Google launched in 1998 — years behind. Yet “Googling” has become synonymous with “searching.”

So, what happened?

When Google launched, they came out with something the others didn’t have: their PageRank algorithm. It ranked pages based on link structure, paired with an extremely simple interface. 

While competitors’ nearly-identical search algorithms sat behind pages stuffed with ads and features, Google gave you a search box and… well, better results.

Friendster launched in 2002. MySpace went live in ‘03. Together, they proved people wanted online profiles, friends, and messaging.

When Facebook arrived in 2004, it wasn’t necessarily looking to topple the giants. It was restricted to Harvard students, and focused on real identity, clean design, and existing offline networks.

Then came the News Feed and real-name policy. These innovations increased engagement by making interactions feel more persistent. Within a few years, Facebook overtook MySpace and became the default social graph layer for much of the internet.

Online stores existed long before Shopify. Merchants used custom carts, open-source tools, and early platforms like Yahoo Stores.

Upon its launch in 2006, Shopify had a singular goal: make it simple for non-technical merchants to get a functional store live.

It offered hosted infrastructure, templates, and apps that handled payments, shipping, and marketing without code. This shifted the founder's job from “wrestle with software” to “focus on product and sales.”

Shopify became the default choice for direct-to-consumer brands, and powers millions of stores.

In no way, shape, or form do I mean to tell you it’s easy to do what these tech behemoths did. They entered established markets, where competitors had already proven demand and claimed territory.

But they made the last meaningful upgrade.

Google's was search relevance. Facebook's was real identity and structured networks. Shopify's was accessible infrastructure.

Each identified one thing the market needed fixed, fixed it definitively, and became the standard.

Speed mattered less than clarity about what made them the final solution.

If you’re pre-launch, stop trying to find ‘the thing no one has ever seen before.’ If you’re already in motion, focus on what you can do meaningfully better than others.

Figure out what would make you the last mover worth caring about.

Answer these three questions about your space:

Single-home: customers typically use one solution (email provider, accounting software, CRM). Multi-home: customers regularly use multiple options (project management tools, note-taking apps, design software).

If you're entering a single-home market, you need to be definitively better at the core job. If it's multi-home, you can win by serving a specific use case exceptionally well.

If yes: study what they do poorly. What do customers complain about? What workarounds have they built?

If no: you're in a nascent market. Speed matters more here, but you still need clarity on what makes your approach stick.

Look for gaps. Shopify won because existing tools served enterprise and developers, but ignored non-technical merchants. Facebook focused on college students with real identities when MySpace catered to anonymous, chaotic profiles.

Write one sentence that completes this frame:

“I'm making [category] work for [specific people] by [one thing competitors can't or won't do].”

Examples:

Your upgrade can take different forms:

Technical superiority: You solve the core problem better (Google's PageRank).

Accessibility: You make something complex simple for a new audience (Shopify's hosted infrastructure).

Structural positioning: You change the rules of how the product works (Facebook requiring identity verification).

The key is picking one core upgrade you can defend and compound over years.

Once you know your upgrade, protect it. There are myriad ways to do this, but some of the most common are:

Network effects: Make the product better as more people use it. Facebook's value grew with every friend who joined.

Brand clarity: Own a specific position in customers' minds. When someone thinks “non-technical ecommerce,” they think Shopify. When they think “professional identity online,” they think LinkedIn.

Deep integration: Offer your core users enough targeted features that they don't want to leave. Shopify does this by bundling hosted stores, integrated payments, and an app ecosystem specifically for non-technical merchants. Basically, make shopping around more work than it’s worth.

Pick one mechanism that fits your upgrade, then ask: what can I do to strengthen it?

If you're looking at integration depth, interview your power users and start systematically solving their issues. If you're building network effects, focus on connecting users.