

 Fringe Benefits: Why startups mustn’t appeal to the masses - baha_man
http://blog.asmartbear.com/play-fringe.html

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wccrawford
Somewhat true. Those niche people always have extreme opinions on things you
wouldn't necessarily expect. Violate one of those opinions and they'll turn on
you as quickly as they glommed on when you said the things they want to hear.

In short, that means that if you try to pivot, you could lose your entire
'fringe' userbase. At one shot. Hopefully you'll see it coming, but you might
not.

URL sharing sites are a great example of this. Slashdot, Digg and Reddit used
to all be tech sites. Slashdot is just barely hanging on, and Digg and Reddit
have gone mainstream. They original userbase of techies have all gone
elsewhere, except for a very few that apparently weren't quite as extremist.

Do they care? No, because they have a much larger audience now. The techies
got everything off the ground, but once everything was established, the flood
of non-techies was allowed and things changed.

~~~
smartbear
Agreed, at scale the argument isn't as powerful. Some stay true, most don't.
It's more of a technique to get started.

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tommasiero
"If we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself"
~~ Dan Formosa / Smart Design. from Documentary "Objectified"

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sarbogast
Now the difficulty seems to be to explain that to investors...

