
How to ensure your startup will fail - matstc
http://howtosplitanatom.com/news/how-to-ensure-your-startup-will-fail/#comment-14119
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Fuca
"Take a look around the net and make certain that you don’t have another huge
player operating in the space that you want to move into." BS, That is how you
end up selling hats for iguanas, dont be afraid of competition just make sure
to do something better.

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mechanical_fish
True, and yet if you literally don't know about the huge player there's a good
chance that you will forget to do something better. Or, if you accidentally do
have some distinctive features, you will neglect to market them properly.

Another way to phrase your point is: "look around the market and make sure
there's a huge player whose customers you can siphon off".

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asmosoinio
Why is the link to the last comment, not to the beginning of the article? Took
me a while to read the linked comment, and to figure out why it was so
important. It wasn't. :)

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Prrometheus
As someone who hasn’t gotten too deep into hackerdom yet, this thought goes
through my mind often when viewing a newly launched startup:

“What you need to understand, right now if you have not already, is that early
adopters are not real people. The geeks, techies, friends and family that
initially use your product are not representative of the public at large.
Their opinions on your product are not representative of what the mainstream
will think.”

I suppose most people want to use their hacking skills to make something
useful in their domain of expertise. Unfortunately, for most hackers their
domain of expertise is hacking, which limits the userspace.

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DaniFong
Unless, as we do, hackers build things for parts of their lives other than
hacking.

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mixmax
Hackers are still not representative of the mass userbase that startups are
looking for if they want to be big. This matters because hackers will value
different things than normal users. RSS springs to mind as an example. If, for
instance, you do a webbased tool to keep track of your tasks one of the first
things a hacker might look for is a rss feed so that he can put it on his
feedreader along with all of his other feeds. Normal people won't even know
what RSS is.

So even though you do a non-hacker product, hackers will still value features
that are of littel importance to a normal crowd.

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yters
Man, I've got to make sure I check Hacker News all the time so I don't miss
this kind of info that'll keep me from failing.

