I don't think this is true. What if you launched early but your product was so bad that it drove away all of your early interest? It's very hard to regain people's interest once they've already evaluated your product and thought it was terrible.
Just being contrarian on this. If I was building something I would keep asking myself: what surprising/niche sub-feature of my application is incredibly valuable to my users yet appears boring to my competitors and how can I become untouchable in this area.