Marketing your startup: dorks vs everyone else

Try some of each and see who gets more excited about it.

Seems it would depend on the product/service you are offering.

I think it really depends on what you do. If you offer the type of product/service that geeks are likely to recommend to their non-geek friends and will still excite geeks target them. I fully believe a great deal of Googles success came from exciting the geek market and using them to spread the word to non-geeks who could tell people to Google it instead of spending time answering a question.

Other companies either don't appeal to geeks or just aren't something a geek is likely to recommend in which case just targeting the general population is probably better.

I would recommend going for the non-geek community ("normal people") 99 times out of 100. Basically, go for real people as customers unless you're selling a bug-tracking app or tech news app or something else that is only pertinent to geeks.

Geeks are less willing to pay for a product or service, because their interest in new startups is largely a technical curiosity and/or a competitive curiosity. The people that are on the cutting-edge of technology are also constantly looking for the next thing, so they lose interest quickly. Non-geeks are much more likely to pay you and to continue paying you if your service actually helps them. An app is likely to be remarkable (in the literal sense) for geeks if it has a unique architecture or was written in an unusual language, etc., whereas an app can be very remarkable/viral among non-geeks as long as it is useful.

In sum: If you want a business, go after non-geeks. If you want 15 minutes of geek-fame, go after geeks.

Why do you choose "dork" instead of "geek?"