[Alex3917]

> how would you distinguish it from the many other small niche markets - like bingo card creators or D&D character sheet generation - that fail to become large growth companies?)

The definition of 'startup' I like best is "a new business that's designed to arbitrage a temporary disequilibrium to produce extraordinary returns."

With bingo card creator or D&D character sheets, there is no temporary economic disequilibrium.

Whereas with Apple, the arbitrage opportunity is that there were personal computer chips but no personal computers. With Facebook it was that there were a billion people who owned computers, but there wasn't anything connecting the people behind the computers. It wasn't obvious that Apple and Facebook would be successful in advance, but they were clearly hitching a ride on mega trends that were already obvious ahead of time. When there is an obvious mega trend, but no dominant company for that mega trend, then that's basically an economic low pressure area that needs to get equilibrated.

With bingo card creator or d&d character sheets, nothing had changed to create any sort of arbitrage opportunity. Maybe there is a demand for those products, maybe there isn't, but a new product with demand does not a startup make.