Go with what you are most comfortable and productive in.
If you want to launch a startup then do that, and leverage all the skills you have (you'll need them).
If you want to learn a new technology then go ahead and do that with some small scale project.
But best not to try and do them both at the same time, there just aren't enough hours in the day.
There are projects out there using ASP.NET -- my (profitable) side project runs on ASP.NET. Forums like HN can become a bit of an echo chamber, it offers a great perspective but remember the tech ecosystem is much larger than what you read in any one place.
The main downside I had with ASP.NET is the higher hosting costs. I started out trying to host on mono so I could use a cheaper VPS. This was a mistake -- it worked for a few months, but had a number of issues which all disappeared when I switched to an EC2 Windows instance.
If you want to launch a startup then do that, and leverage all the skills you have (you'll need them).
If you want to learn a new technology then go ahead and do that with some small scale project.
But best not to try and do them both at the same time, there just aren't enough hours in the day.
There are projects out there using ASP.NET -- my (profitable) side project runs on ASP.NET. Forums like HN can become a bit of an echo chamber, it offers a great perspective but remember the tech ecosystem is much larger than what you read in any one place.
The main downside I had with ASP.NET is the higher hosting costs. I started out trying to host on mono so I could use a cheaper VPS. This was a mistake -- it worked for a few months, but had a number of issues which all disappeared when I switched to an EC2 Windows instance.