Does a story start at the begining? Crafting Chapter 1

Here's a question for all you writers. When you are starting your novel, short story, whatever.....do you start with chapter 1?

I don't. Its far too intimidating try to find that clever opening paragraph (or clever opening sentence for that matter!!) I generally stare at the blank word doc in front of me for a few minutes, hours, days, then snap out of it and flip to writing the part of the story that attracted me to the storyline in the first place...

But eventually, you have to go back to chapter 1 and write it. If you're lucky, you've been inspired and now an opening pitch just comes to you. That never happens to me. So in my research, I stumbled upon agent Nathan Bransford's post about opening with dialogue. Basically, his input was, if its great, compelling opening dialogue then great, it works. However, if its not, it can do a lot to set a negative tone that you can't easily recover from. Plus, if your dialogue is confusing without the explanation of context, then your readers brows are already furrowed. Not a great way to start.

So after reading this + the user comments, the first thing I did was go to chapter one and cross out my first sentence.....back to work!