"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.

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".

Ignore your competitors otherwise you'll obsessed with their success and/or end up with a clone of their product and significantly less users.

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. :)

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.

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

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.

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.