That's cool that you are. I'd suggest you're probably in a minority, but good luck to you all the same. The ability to execute on ideas is the most important thing, and if it's easier for you to execute using a .NET stack, fantastic!

What minority is that exactly that they are in? .NET vs what exactly? "Microsoft vs. Open-Source" maybe? Or ".NET vs. Haskell"?

I'd think they are the minority on HN but I always chuckle at people who think all startups post/read HN and thus HN is representative of the entire startup culture...

To be clear, it's my gut feeling - based on the personal experiences, that most web-based startups are not using the MS platform for a variety of reasons, pricing being one of them. The "vs" example above would simply be ".NET vs non-.NET" If you think .NET-oriented web-based startups have a > 50% share of that market, I'd really be curious as to any evidence (even anecdotal) for that belief.

"startup C#" - 818 jobs http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=startup+C%23&l=

"startup php" - 1373 jobs http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=startup+php&l=

However: "php" has 17236 http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=php&l=

"C#" has 41446 http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&l=

C# has a much higher number of job postings, but far fewer with the word "startup" in the post.

Yes, totally unscientific, but it seems to indicate what I'm seeing in the real world. Looking at my own network, which includes a variety of .net, php, ruby, python and java folks, the overwhelming number of people involved in bootstrapping, freelancing or startup endeavours are not using .NET.

Again, I point to websitespark, bizspark, and MS' own efforts in helping PHP operate smoothly on their own platform. 10 years ago PHP was laughed at by most MS people I know. Today, it still is by many of the same people, but Microsoft as a company must see enough demand for it that they spend time with some of the PHP development team making sure that PHP runs smoothly on Windows. MS now provides a one-click installer for PHP on top of that.

Yes, certainly, all this is simply anecdotal, and I've absolutely no way of knowing for certain how many 'startups' use .net vs not using it. When people still refer to facebook as a 'startup' perhaps the term has lost all meaning whatsoever, and anyone who's opened a company in the past 15 years is now running a 'startup'. But again, I fall back to my own experiences in and around my network. People * I know* using .NET are generally doing so in larger corporate environments (where it's much easier to afford all the tooling which makes .NET fun/easy to develop with) People I know in smaller orgs, smallbiz startup mode, or freelancing are generally not using .NET, primarily because of price.

The pricing is part of the motivation behind websitespark and bizspark programs of the past couple years. If MS themselves weren't seeing a defection in the smallbiz/startup scene away from the MS platform, I doubt we'd have seen these programs come in to existence in the first place. We certainly didn't see them 12 years ago.

This belief was also largely reinforced by casual 'in the hallway' conversations with attendees at the recent CodeStock event in Knoxville. While language-agnostic in theory, it's still largely an MS-oriented event, based on both attendees' background and session topics around 50% of the topics were .net-oriented)