Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for the other advice you're seeing, but the article isn't really suggesting that you can go to the adwords tool with a blank slate and find a market. Rather that you can use the adwords tool to validate that a market exists based on search volume.

View on HN

The book Start Small, Stay Small, gives examples of this, as well as ideas on finding niche markets.

Interesting and useful stuff. You may locate a niche market, find that there is genuine interest in it as reflected in ad words, and also get a sense for what the existing market is like (e.g., is there already a highly-dominate player, and is it cost-effective to try to move into this niche).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com