These "startup advice" articles on Hacker News always come off as cheap marketing. Each one seems to make sense, but are so imprecise and arbitrary that they are absolutely useless in practice. Tomorrow there will be another article that points out that you have to add extra features that your competition doesn't have and that's the way to do it, and upon reading it too will make sense.
And about this particular article, can you be any more banal than by stating "do one thing and do it well"? The only difference is that usually people make comparisons to Swiss army knife and in this case it's that ninja tool.
It reminds me of the Forer Effect, usually used to describe how Horoscopes can sound like they apply to you, but are written in an abstract enough way such that they could possibly apply to anybody.
> can you be any more banal than by stating "do one thing and do it well"?
While this does apply to the article, it isn't even that good of advice for startups. It's not enough to do one thing really well. That one thing also must be needed very much by no matter how small group of people. You can create app that is really good at finding just McDonalds restaurants in your area, for example, but if nobody really needs it it will not matter.
Agreed. This advice is not scalable either - should I be carrying a ruler, a bottle opener, screw drivers all separately because startups only focus on one thing? Logic tells me anybody would prefer a 'wallet ninja' like product instead.
And about this particular article, can you be any more banal than by stating "do one thing and do it well"? The only difference is that usually people make comparisons to Swiss army knife and in this case it's that ninja tool.