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Comment by mkramlich | Hacker News Reader

yes please share that info with 1000's of would-be competitors with the right skill sets and entrepreneurial drive ;)

If having a niche is your main competitive advantage, I'm not sure success will last long anyway.

That's not necessarily the case. There are many niches that aren't obviously profitable. From the outside, it seems like they'd be a waste of time until someone discovers a way to make money with them.

also, certain niches may have limited time windows where it's relatively easier to make profits and/or there are no competitors active in it or only a few. after this window, profits are driven down to commodity levels and/or a large number of strong competitors enter the same space and bite off some percentage or all of the market that was previously yours

It'd be fun if, every once in a while, a post was just dropped on HN pointing out a time-limited niche as it begins. The result would be somewhere between a flash-mob and a gold-rush: hundreds of competitors popping into existence in the same space over the course of a weekend.

Of which very few would survive 2 years. :p

Part of the reason many niche markets exist is due to a need for domain knowledge, be it about the product itself, or the particular community you are servicing. I would argue that most niche players have either or both of these attributes, which allows them to hold their ground against would-be competitors.

If domain knowledge is the main barrier to entry, the competitive advantage is not the fact that it's a niche, but the fact that you know something that your competitors don't about that niche.

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