398: The Hidden Cost of Being First

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Today, we will talk about the pros and cons of being early in the market or building a competing alternative within an existing one and what that might mean for the complexity of your product. This episode is sponsored by paddle.com, my merchant of record payment provider of choice who has been helping me to focus on PodScan from day one. They're taking care of all the things related to money so that founders like me and you could focus on building the things that only we can build. Paddle handles the rest, things like sales tax and credit cards failing. All of that, they do it so I don't have to. Highly recommend it. So please go and check out paddle.com. Now here's a story that I think every founder needs to hear because it reveals something quite fundamental about markets and competition and the hidden costs of being first. In the world of Python programming, there has been a tool called pip or PIP that has dominated package installation for years, decades even. Like it has been the de facto way to install Python packages through all the many different versions of Python that have existed in the past. And it worked, it solved the problem and it became quite ubiquitous. You have similar tools in other spaces like NPM for JavaScript or Composer for PHP but I'm going to talk about something in the Python world today because recently the new competitor tool kind of emerged and it's called UV just those two letters. UV is what I believe to be a reimplementation of that same installer, but here's the kicker it is so much faster than the original that people often run it and they think it didn't work because it's so fast. They're so used to PIP taking a lot of time, maybe going to grab a coffee while packages install that with UV they blink and it's done. The speed difference is that dramatic with this kind of tool. So if you're using Python, you really should look into this, but even if you're not, I think there's something to learn about it here. UV probably would never exist if it hadn't been for the many, many years of PIP being used, being built and growing into the tool that it became. And I think there's the story here a learning that goes way beyond Python tooling. When you're building the very first solution of anything in a certain space you face what I call unavoidable complexity. You're not just building something complex because you want it to be complex. You're building it in a complex way because you simply don't know what you don't know. You don't know what easy looks like. You don't know what simple looks like. You just know what you need to do to get anywhere. Think about it. When people set out to build PIP, they didn't know about …