The cost of being early

There is a lie we tell ourselves at 2 a.m while refreshing a half-dead dashboard, and the lie goes like this: being early is being earlier than early. As if the person who bought Bitcoin in 2011 and the person who built a Bitcoin wallet in 2011 are playing the same sport. They are not. They are not even in the same ballpark. One of them is a tourist who showed up before the tour buses and the season pass; the other is a cartographer drawing a map of a continent that may not even see its maiden voyage.

We keep pricing these two roles the same because both jobs involve the word “early” and our language is lazy as well as our assignment to these roles. The consumer gets novelty, status, a story. The creator gets a terrain nobody has mapped, tooling nobody has built(or sometimes not even thought of), and an audience that has not arrived yet or might never. The consumer’s risk is capped at the price of admission. The creator’s risk has no floor. And yet from the outside — from the podcasts, the blog posts, the conference stages — they look like the same win, costing the same bill, worth the same risks.

They are not the same. They are not meant to be the same.

Buying a lottery ticket with someone else’s money

The consumer who is early generally gets a good deal. They show up before the line forms. They get the beta invite, the obscure newsletter, the neighborhood restaurant before the Michelin star. Their downside is capped. If the thing flops, they have a story and sometimes a hole in the pocket but never a mortgage. If the thing pops, they have status, and many a times, an incentive by the creator to keep them in the loop by giving them a discount. Either way, the cost is finite and its known.

This is not a moral failing. Being an early consumer is one of life’s cleanest pleasures. You get to feel like an insider without actually being inside anything. You get to say “I was there” without having to build wherever “there” turned out to be, although you do sometimes share your opinions on where and how it should have been built. The consumer’s relationship to early-ness is asymmetric in their favor. The early consumer is respected both by the community and by the creator.

But here is the trap. Because early consumers look like they are winning, we assume early creators are winning too. We see the founder on a podcast talking about how they “saw this coming” and we mentally file them next to the person who bought Apple stock in 1982. We do not see the invoice. This is akin to the survivorship bias assuming that the person who survived the plane crash was the one who had the best seat. Not every creator or their creation survives the test of time and market. We tend to forget that the consumer being catered to is in either case the king. If the thing succeeds, the creator and the consumer are both winners. If the thing fails, the consumer still goth something out of it from being early.

Paying rent on a future the market may refuse to occupy

The creator who is early does not get a badge instead they get a shovel and a fog machine. They are expected to build the infrastructure for a world that does not yet believe it needs the infrastructure. They are meant to be explaining a solution to people who have not yet felt the problem or haven’t realised it. They are making architectural bets; real, structural and novel bets; in a market that still wants the old thing, only slightly faster.

Let me give you an example, look at htmx. htmx solved something real. It asked:

What if hypermedia already worked? What if you did not need a mountain of JavaScript to make a button do something interesting?

It was a clean, architectural answer to a problem the industry had spent a decade pretending required more complexity, not less. And yet it did not take over the world. It found its people, it found its niche, but the wider market retreated to the safer option, the framework, the build step, the SPA, the thing everyone already knew. The timing was wrong in the creator’s sense. The world was not ready to be convinced that less could be enough. Or maybe it was not, and the world simply refused to change.

Or look at Windows Phone. Windows Phone solved things iOS and Android could not touch at the time. The typography was gorgeous. The information density was superior. The live tiles were genuinely useful. The unified social identity of a contact was and still is unheard of. The OS had ideas that the competition would later copy. And it still died. Not because it was bad. Not because it failed to solve real problems. It died because the promoters(the carriers, the developers and the retailers) and the users already locked into app ecosystems did not back it. The market retreated to the safer option. The timing was the issue. The world did not want a better phone. It wanted the phone it already understood.

This is the creator’s bill. You can be architecturally right. You can solve problems the incumbents cannot solve. You can build something genuinely better. And you can still end up with your face in the dirt because the market was never actually asking for a revolution. It was asking for a slightly warmer version of the status quo. Or maybe your convictions were not strong enough to convince the market that the future you were building was the future the market needed.

The evangelism trap

The most expensive mistake an early creator can make is to spend their time convincing the world instead of building. Every hour you spend explaining why your approach is right is an hour you did not spend making the thing so good that the explanation becomes unnecessary.

Before a category exists, every conversation is a pitch. Not a pitch for your product. A pitch for the idea that your product is allowed to exist. You are translating. You are building the vocabulary. You are asking people to unlearn what they already know so they can learn what you are offering. And most of them do not want to unlearn. Unlearning is uncomfortable. It threatens their identity, their resume, their sunk cost, their tribal affiliation.

So they resist. Not with arguments. With inertia. With shrugs. With “that is interesting” followed by zero action. With “we will keep an eye on it” which means they will forget about it by lunch. And the creator, desperate for traction, starts to evangelize harder. They write the manifesto. They give the talk. They debate on Twitter, sorry, I mean X(why the hell???). They explain, over and over, why the old way is broken and the new way is inevitable. They put all their energy into explaining the why instead of building the what.

Meanwhile, the product stalls. Because explaining is not building. Debating is not shipping. The creator has traded the hard work of making the thing undeniable for the seductive work of being the smartest person in the room. The market does not need your convincing. The market needs your product to be so obviously right that convincing becomes obsolete. If you have to explain it too much, the timing is probably wrong.

Why the market retreats

The market retreats to safer options for reasons that have almost nothing to do with quality. Consumers, I mean everyone from individual users to enterprise buyers to developers choosing a stack, are not rational evaluators. They are shit-scared, stereotyped, and emotionally attached.

They are too stereotyped in their thinking. They have a category in their head and your thing does not fit it. So they mash it into the nearest existing shape and wonder why it looks wrong. A new architectural approach gets judged by the standards of the old architecture. A new product category gets measured by the metrics of the old category. The creator and their creation is being graded on a test they did not write and maybe didn’t account for.

They are too shit-scared in their pajamas to try a new thing. Change carries risk. Career risk. Reputation risk. The risk of looking stupid in a Slack channel. Most people would rather be quietly wrong with everyone else than be possibly right alone. The safe option is safe because it is shared. Your better option is dangerous because it is yours.

They are too invested in some primal tech that is already old and archaic but emotionally and nostalgically fingering them in just the right way not to let them get separated. This is the hardest one. People do not just use old tools. They love them. The tool got them their first job. The tool is what they were good at when they felt competent. The tool is wrapped up with their sense of who they are. You are not asking them to switch products. You are asking them to break up with a part of themselves. To loose their identity. To feel stupid. To venture out into a world where they are not the smartest person in the room. Then they have to do their own thinking.

You cannot argue someone out of nostalgia. You cannot logic someone out of fear. You cannot category-hop someone out of a stereotype. The creator who tries is burning time on people who were never going to move anyway.

Why waste your time on people who are not going to come around anyway? And if they eventually do come around, they will come around because the thing is so good that it does not need explaining in the first place.

The timing tax

The cruelest geometry of creation is that being right about what does not mean you are right about when. You can see the curve perfectly and still drown before the wave arrives. You can predict the future and still fail because the future showed up five years late and you ran out of money in year three. Both htmx and Windows Phone paid this tax. The market came around, partially, eventually but not in time for their creators who placed the bet.

This is not a bug “in” the system. It “is” the system. Categories do not arrive fully formed. They arrive in fits, in false starts, in moments when the conditions are finally right. The creator who is too early builds the ladder that someone else climbs. The creator who is too late builds the ladder that no one climbs.

You have to carefully choose to be the right kind of early with the right product and hope the market catches up to it.

What the creator should actually do

If your architectural bet is right, the best thing you can do is keep building until the world catches up. Not louder. Not angrier. Not more explanatory. Just better. Make the thing so good that when the conditions finally align, your thing is the obvious answer. It makes the people who ignored or skipped over you seem foolhardy and the people who did not believe you seem naive. It should make the answer seem obvious and the problem seem trivial.

This requires a different kind of patience than evangelism. Evangelism gives you dopamine. Building in obscurity gives you doubt. But the doubt is cheaper than the evangelism trap. The doubt does not burn your credibility. The doubt does not alienate the people who might eventually come around. The doubt keeps you honest.

I am going to make a statement here. The people who actually succeed in the early days are the ones who do not have to explain. They do not have to explain because the thing is so good that it does not need explaining. The explaining or the convincing is the work of corporations that have the moolah to spend on marketing. The creator does not have that luxury. The creator has to make the thing so good that it becomes obvious. The creator has to make the thing so good that it becomes undeniable.

People needed a calorie tracker by capturing an image of their food without needing to enter manually, who the hell needs to explain that? People needed a way to share their life and feelings without having to think about it, who the hell needs to explain that? People needed a way to work effortlessly without having to use physical spreadsheets, who the hell needs to explain that?

Stop trying to convince the world. Try to obviate your solution.

But, most importantly, pick your battles. Some people are already sold to the other side. They are not your audience. They will never be your audience. Trying to convert them is a form of vanity. Let them have their old tech. Let them have their fear. Let them have their nostalgia. You are not in the convincing business. You are in the building business.

The question before the bet

If you are considering an early bet, a startup, a new medium, a new category or a new platform, ask yourself with brutal honesty: Am I being asked to pay the consumer price or the creator price?

The consumer price is: time, money, attention, maybe a little notoriety.

The creator price is: all of that, plus the unglamorous work of building the world in which your thing makes sense, plus the risk that the world never arrives, plus the cost of dismantling if it does not, plus the spiritual toll of watching the market retreat to something worse because it was safer.

The creator price is almost always higher than it looks. The receipts arrive in currencies you cannot exchange or in denominations you cannot afford.

That does not mean you should not pay it. Some architectural bets are worth making. Some futures are worth building before anyone else believes in them. Some categories need fanatics who are willing to look ridiculous for five years.

But do not pretend you are buying a lottery ticket when you are actually buying the lottery machine. Do not confuse the badge with the bill. And if you choose to be early in the creator sense, BUILD. Build more than you talk. Let the market prove itself. Because convincing the world why you are right is the fastest way to end up with your face in the shit — right, early, and broke.

Are you prepared to pay the cost of being early?