Fringe Benefits: Why startups mustn’t appeal to the masses

Somewhat true. Those niche people always have extreme opinions on things you wouldn't necessarily expect. Violate one of those opinions and they'll turn on you as quickly as they glommed on when you said the things they want to hear.

In short, that means that if you try to pivot, you could lose your entire 'fringe' userbase. At one shot. Hopefully you'll see it coming, but you might not.

URL sharing sites are a great example of this. Slashdot, Digg and Reddit used to all be tech sites. Slashdot is just barely hanging on, and Digg and Reddit have gone mainstream. They original userbase of techies have all gone elsewhere, except for a very few that apparently weren't quite as extremist.

Do they care? No, because they have a much larger audience now. The techies got everything off the ground, but once everything was established, the flood of non-techies was allowed and things changed.

"If we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself" ~~ Dan Formosa / Smart Design. from Documentary "Objectified"

Now the difficulty seems to be to explain that to investors...