[pjhyett]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "only vaguely." The fact that passionate developers are building developer tools has a lot to do with why we've been successful.

Chris, the CEO, has spoken at length about this topic. He and I built another site prior to GitHub where there was very little correlation between our interests and the product we were building. Not surprisingly, our hearts weren't in it and we threw in the towel.

All of this said, just because you're working on something you're passionate about doesn't immediately mean you're bound for success; it just helps tremendously.

[SoftwareMaven]

I say only vaguely because what you want to use may or may not have any correlation with what people want to buy, and it is extremely risky to assume that correlation exists.

just because you're working on something you're passionate about doesn't immediately mean you're bound for success; it just helps tremendously.

It helps immensely (in fact, if you don't have that, you are doing it wrong, IMO :), as long as you don't let your passion get in the way of figuring out what your customer wants.

Like I said, dev tools are a special breed that have more wiggle room for this, but as my experience shows, it is not immune from failure (in fact, developers are notoriously cheap because there are so many good, free dev tools out there, but I bet developers aren't your primary customer, but rather their managers).

My response can be summed up in one sentence: with all startup advice, beware survivor bias!