Keep up the good work!

Its hard enough to build something that people want in the first place. This is not to say that one should never think about revenue but building something people want is more important still.
Good point about being the first one to start something. When the time of an idea comes then competition would most likely exist. Competition == validation

Nithya,

This is a nice article, it was a nice reading. I dont have much of experience in web startups to put up any great insights..

Another one is :If you are the first of the kind to start something, please look around as to why it doesnt already exist. sometimes some services don’t exist for a reason!

Taking this as an example: Considering about Dog Food Sites(famous one from Guy’s presentation) , lots of sites provided this service and all of them bombed during the bust…They had no value but we can see “How VC’s operate”…Normally, they may see that an X VC is funding a Y Startup, than A VC would also try to fund B startup in the same space, so many times wrong startups get funded.

May be you can add one more point to your article:
Complimentary Qualities: If one person is a Tech Guy than one more(or few others) should be Marketing guys since, at the EOD(as you have mentioned with the advent of Open Source), so many websites turn up and down, but the ones that stick are the ones that understand their users and take the best possible channels to reach their users. Hope it makes sense.

-Himanshu Sheth