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> Sometimes, intentionally going after a market niche can be a good thing Solo founder of a successful self-funded business here. A market niche is in my opini
by jwr 4y ago
> Sometimes, intentionally going after a market niche can be a good thing
Solo founder of a successful self-funded business here. A market niche is in my opinion the best place to be. A niche will be enough for a small business, but might be too small for the crazed GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH mindset of most companies. That's good! It means that you won't be competing with companies burning through VC money and selling at below cost (as in $19/month B2B SaaS) just to get GROWTH.
As to the main point of the article — pretty much all advice I was given turned out to be wrong. And nearly everything you read on HN (especially comments) is wrong. Or, more precisely, it's advice given by people who are not in your situation, have never experienced your situation, and likely never will. This applies to business strategy, but also to technology: your choices will be influenced by very different factors than those of people commenting here. You won't care about "industry-standard practices", fashions, trends, or "will it help my career" factors. You will care about line count, total cost of ownership, pace of changes (things that change quickly are expensive to use), reliability, and the ability to fix things when something breaks.
So, my advice would be to make your own choices and take all advice with a very critical mindset. Including this advice, obviously :-)
- scubakid 4y ago100%. Or actually maybe I should say 75%... I think you're spot on that industry veterans, seasoned entrepreneurs, and assorted commenters (myself included of course), often give advice that's not quite calibrated to one's specific scenario and constraints; and sometimes those calibration errors can lead to conclusions that are 180 degrees off the actual best path. But at the same time, I would also say that over the years I've read a lot of great commentary on HN that I'd like to think has improved my overall mental model of the world, technology, and business. P.S. I also agree that when you hear stories of venture-backed startups trying similar product ideas but then needing to pivot due to insufficient growth, that should often be music to the ears of a solo bootstrapper ;)