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Comment by lowglow | Hacker News Reader

I've called these the 10% startups. They typically only serve people in the top ~10% of earners in the US.

This shouldn't be taken as a negative per se. If that is your target market and your business can become sustainable only serving this tranche of consumers, good on you. There is a lot of money to be made serving the top decile of earners.

Which is not a bad market to serve when that 10% owns 75% of all wealth in the US.

Source: Credit Suisse: https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fi...

So basically any startup with an iOS only product (disclaimer our's is iOS only).

Given that iOS has a 40%+ market share in the US, no.

The market for smartphones is only about mid-60% of all Americans, though, from what I've read. So still not 10%, but more like 25%-ish.

Well, the original comment was "10% of earners" and I'd bet that smartphone penetration is higher among earners (eg 20% of Americans are under 14, 0% of them are earners and ??~10% of them have a smartphone). So you could perhaps push it up to more like 1/3 earners use iOS, which is starting to be a healthy potential market share.

> 20% of Americans are under 14, 0% of them are earners and ??~10% of them have a smartphone

OT but 10%? I'd've guessed at least twice that.

I just made it up, I don't even know anyone under 14.

Most lawyers serve the top 10%, yet they are here in good and bad times.

I misread this as 'lawmakers', but your sentence still seemed correct either way.

Almost everything, service or product, begins by first appealing to the top 10%. It moves down the line from there. It holds true to a nearly universal point.

AWS, for example, was so expensive initially as to be ridiculous for most purposes unless you had a lot of money to waste. It was a 10% service. Now it's a 50% service. Tomorrow it'll be a 75-90% service.

The examples that don't follow this pattern, are usually riding on previous examples of the pattern that already became cheaper (such as mobile phones -> smart phones).

It is like fishing. When you are fishing for smaller fish, people wonder if they have a shoe on the end of the line. Nobody ever questions the whale.

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