There are three companies listed on the American stock exchanges with over 1,000 employees who sell products which directly compete with me. (They are, of course, much less important to those companies than they are to me.) Software-wise, there were ~15 shareware products and ~7 web applications last time I checked a few years ago. At least three of them actually know what they're doing (and one of those was launched by a participant from another forum I'm on who, ahem, paid me the sincerest form of flattery).

In a broader sense of the word "competition", my program is a proper subset of Microsoft Excel, I compete with the world's savviest Internet publishers (like Demand Media) for large portions of the queries of interest to me, and a portion of my queries are dual-use for a multi-billion a year industry. (Teachers are not the only folks interested in the top ten for [bingo cards].)

I mean, its not like I went and made a URL shortener or zip file extractor, but I also didn't go make something so staggeringly unique the world had not heard of it before or since.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever thought about adapting your bingo card creator to make cards for plain old bingo. You know, with the numbers and not words?

Nonsense. First, I'm sure that Patrick does have competition in his niche (a simple Google for "bingo card software" reveals a litany of options). Second, having no competition is a big warning sign that perhaps that niche isn't a great one to go into. Third, you would be well-advised to avoid niches that are highly over-competitive. Finally, most businesses are pretty terrible, and not all that hard to run circles around, especially if you follow some of Patrick's advice here (I'm thinking particularly of the stuff regarding time debt and building repeatable processes).

The central theme in Patrick's post was not "how much to work", but "how to work effectively".

His points are especially relevant to people working with lots of competition.

Patrick has been writing about his competition for awhile. He has not cornered the market on bingo cards.

I disagree. The big parts of it seem to be 1) Talking (as in person-to-person) to customers and potential customers 2) Focus 3) Determination.