if no one is competing with you, it doesn't matter too much how good you are.
Temporarily. Once people see you're doing well with no competition the competition will spring forth, no matter how good you are. If you're also doing things badly those competitors will eat your lunch.
That isn't a reason not to launch when your product is very basic and scrappy. You don't need to make it good, and definitely not perfect. You just need to go fast.
If first mover advantage in internet payment processing was important, CyberCash would still be around. I'm pretty sure there was another internet payment processor around before PayPal too.
Setup was harder, and the integration wasn't the same, but it was before PCI, so integrating with CyberCash meant you could own the whole payment flow, and have a better experience than PayPal, where you send the user off, and when they come back, PayPal may not have confirmed payment yet.
Yes, but PayPal was growing off the back of eBay, CyberCash never became entrenched to get the first mover's advantage
> The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 11, 2001. VeriSign acquired the Cybercash assets (except for ICVerify) and name a couple of months later. On November 21, 2005 PayPal (already an eBay company) acquired VeriSign's payment services, including Cybercash.
As an example, if no one is competing with you, it doesn't matter too much how good you are.