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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

When you’ve got an idea, and a team, and you’re raring to get started on hacking for a potential startup, a question that often comes up is, “well, what technology should we use?” (hopefully you’ve answered the necessary, “what problem are we solving and how are going to solve it” questions first).

And hopefully, long before that, you've answered "Who cares about this?", "How will I make money?", "Is there actually a big enough market?", and so on...

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Meh - I'd rather make something that's awesome for myself, then figure out marketing it so other people can benefit as well. I believe that thinking about a market and how to make money first is the wrong avenue to go down if you actually want to care about a product you make.

If I want it for myself, I'll make it. If I think other people will want it, I'll find a way to get it there - either by selling or giving it away. Maybe that makes me a bad entrepreneur, but it means I have more fun in the things I build.

You just described the difference between a project and a business. All businesses are projects, but not all projects are businesses. There is nothing wrong with creating projects for the sake of creating projects. But if you are trying to create a business, market and marketing come first and you should consider them way before writing your first line of code.

I still disagree. Just because something isn't business viable doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. You should pretty much always do it - then decide if there's a market/think about how to market for it.

A business for the sake of just making a business feels wrong. A business for the sake of making an awesome product feels right.

You seem to be implicitly thinking of 'marketing' as pejorative.

I'd suggest instead that identifying an audience for a potential product is actually part of making an awesome product.

There's a pretty wide stretch of territory between not caring whether something is business viable and only caring about building a successful business.

He meant that if your goal is to make money with a business, then you should start with businessy stuff like figuring out if there's a market for what you want to build.

You're free to start a business by building the product of your dreams, but no matter how much you personally like it, there's no guarantee people will pay for it. In other words, if you want money, but start with building a product, you're likely to have a bad time.

But if you just want to build an awesome product, and don't care about whether you make any money with it, then there's no problem.

Meh - there's a lot of people out there scratching itches that are nothing more than minor inconveniences.

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