>People accuse me of working on "boring" business stuff. I prefer to call myself the "digital Willie Sutton". Why play roulette when the bank vaults are open?

>People accuse me of working on "boring" business stuff. I prefer to call myself the "digital Willie Sutton". Why play roulette when the bank vaults are open? I think there are two reasons: Hackers tend to be male computer geeks who majored in CS or something like that, and they write for markets that they understand, so they're mostly concentrated in the same markets because they understand the same things. Even within the Web 2.0 sphere lots of markets are ignored. Here's an example of a site that serves knitters: https://www.ravelry.com/account/login https://www.ravelry.com/account/login They've been around for less than a year and they have over 100K users. I only know about them because my wife knits. They have (or had when I checked it out several months ago) essentially no competition, because the intersection of people who are interested in hacking and knitting consists of very few people. IIRC it was written by the husband of a knitter. Second, dealing with businesses is kind of daunting. I think I could write better software than my pharmacy has in a matter of months, but I would either have to sell it to risk-averse PHBs who don't understand technology or start my own mail-order pharmacy. Just writing some web app and putting it up has a far lower activation energy, even if there is more competition and the market is ultimately smaller. But if you know your market and are comfortable dealing with these businesses, you're in a great position. I can't imagine that any software would be boring if it's for your own startup.