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.
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.
“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.