As important at the first chapter in any novel can be, it is worth your time to consider a prologue.
In a nutshell, the prologue is an overview of the situation that you are about to begin reading about. Or, it is a summary of the "backstory" tells you what made all the stuff you're about to read happen.
Some writers prefer to develop these as action-oriented scenes that set the stage for what follows. they are meant to grab your attention. It may matter to the story when you first learn that a character was in a certain place at a certain time, years ago. Some what happened to any of us years ago can affect how we do things today. At first glance, what appears to be common knowledge could be...
You can see where I'm going with this.
I like to paint my word pictures on a big canvas, where things move quickly. I find it most useful to begin a prologue in narrator's voice. Think of it as a voice-over you might hear when a movie starts. Giving you the short version of what has already happened lets me spill more ink faster to reach the "good stuff," like revelations, betrayals, and sometimes...violence.
Prologues let you say something about the fictional world you are working in just once, without ever having to repeat it. Giving readers that sense of foreknowledge can allow their imagination to do more--or less--with that pretend history, as they see fit. Reaching beyond the origin of some things can be quite liberating for the writer who doesn't quite know how their story should end. Grinding out the major portions of any story gives you a chance to rethink the actual start of what just happened in your chapters. That's why some popular stories eventually spawn a prequel, because enough has already happened to make readers want to know more about...the past.
that's why you may have heard a saying that goes: "past is prologue to the future."