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Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

shant.nu

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Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#171

Post by satisfice »

The relationship between paid work and unpaid work can be complicated.

I make a living doing something I would still do if not paid. I know this is true because I do in fact voluntarily engage in a lot of unpaid work of exactly the sort I am paid for. The kind of work I do is training. I train software testers.

Working without pay is nice because it is lower stress. I generate new training material in this way.

Working with pay means I have customers. Customers deserve value for money. So, it’s more stress. Still, I only teach what I believe. It’s fun for me. I have agency.

But I rely on people to sign up. If not enough sign up, that will be the end of my business. I don’t know what I would do, then— except I know for sure that I will continue teaching until a few days before my death.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#172

Post by hw »

a13n wrote: post #47
bdw5204 wrote: post #39

Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make "what the market wants" rather than what you want, you're going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on "what the market wants".…

Eh, at the same time, I think the problem a lot of entrepreneurs have is that they overfocus on "what you are interested in" instead of "what the market wants", and therefore build something that nobody wants. If you can find a perfect intersection, that's beautiful, but probably uncommon. Some of the most lucrative businesses are stuff like (anti)fraud/security/payments that is pretty darn drab.

They are lucrative because they are drab. No one wants to build the unsexy stuff such as enterprise tax systems. It’s also normally one that requires deep technical knowledge outside of tech

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#173

Post by jongjong »

bdw5204 wrote: post #39

Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make "what the market wants" rather than what you want, you're going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on "what the market wants".…

This comment is a summary of everything I used to believe which I had to unlearn the hard way.

I had a similar experience as the author, I worked on passion projects (in software), some for many years. I had some success in terms of traction and also some success financially related to a different project (though that proved to be short-lived). Initially, I thought to myself "How lucky am I that I appreciate efficiency and modularity since that's exactly what the market needs." WRONG. What a brainwashed moron I was. The market does not necessarily want the most efficient solution; especially in the tech industry which is founded on monopolies where the money will come in no matter what the efficiency is; efficiency is irrelevant, so long as a solution just works and you have the right social connections a company might pay 100x more than it's worth; will barely make a dent in the balance sheet. Unfortunately, I didn't have any social connections.

So yeah I can fully relate with the author of the article. DO NOT FOLLOW YOUR PASSION IF YOU WANT TO MAKE MONEY. FOLLOW THE MARKET AND EXPAND YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK. If the market cares about adherence to some fickle trend, make sure that your product adheres to that trend and make sure you get involved in the money-oriented community which inevitably forms around that juicy cash-rich, "fickle as a squirrel at a nut convention" trend!

Worst case you can sell your hot startup to Google for a few millions and they will shut down the whole thing later when they realize how crap of an idea it was but who cares. You got paid and now you can use the money to fund your next financial scheme and make even more money while all the passionate morons rot in their poverty and comment on HN about how shitty everything is because their time is worthless in dollar terms.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#174

Post by ido »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #170
bdw5204 wrote: post #39

Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make "what the market wants" rather than what you want, you're going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on "what the market wants".…

His mistake was more basic. A hobby is done for pleasure. The idea is that you can focus on any part of it without any pressure. Business on the other hand is the opposite. You need to focus on what the market wants and the business needs, not always what you want, and there is lots of pressure to get it right. Anything less will put you out of business. Even as a career you have a similar problem. You have to do wha…

I disagree with such blanket statements. I would phrase it as - know what you're getting into, starting a business will mostly have your running a business rather than doing the "individual contributor" work.

If you still want to do it while knowing that, go ahead- just keep your eyes open. And for those of us blessed to work in fields like software development the risks aren't even that high - most likely if your business fails you will have no problem getting a (likely higher paid than you had before) job afterwards.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#175

Post by ido »

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #104
pessimizer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they overfocus on "what you are interested in" instead of "what the market wants" One sure difference between these two things is that you absolutely know what you are interested in, but your opinions about what the market wants are going to be speculative until you have customers. edit: i.e. judging what you think is beautiful vs. a Keynesian beauty contest.

I agree with pretty much this whole chain of comments, at least in spirit. As someone who has turned his interests into his business, it really can be tough. I have always loved infrastructure, and I have always loved maintaining certain applications and workload types. On the one hand, you do start to understand after awhile what the “MVP” looks like. On the other hand you can eventually fairly well predict what you…

As a fellow someone who turned his interest into a business (that I'm still currently running) I agree it's a challenge but having a career as an employee is also challenging in a different way.

For example I found having to seem like a good employee to my boss by looking busy and not leaving before at least 6pm a sort of stress I don't have now that I don't have a boss - I don't have to pretend I'm working at least 40h/w if I manage to do what I need to in less and go pick up my kids from school in the early afternoon some days.

At the end of the day although I'm more stressed in some ways (and less in others), I've never been as happy as an employee as I have been running my own company. You can even learn to enjoy the new aspects of your work that have to do with running a business and adapting to the market.

Like you I also learned a lot about aspects that I never understood as an employee and I'm now a lot more careful before judging other people's actions without having all the context (sometimes it makes sense from the inside)!

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#176

Post by urinotherapist »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #77

I firmly believe that if you follow your passion and create something that solves a problem you're passionate about, that no one else has solved yet (i.e. with the features you care about, at a price you can afford), you'll find others with the same passion who want what you're selling. That's not the same as saying you can sell "anything", or that you can definitively strike it rich doing so. My simple math is this.…

These potential users must have connection to internet, speak your language, have free time to interact to watch you, have free money to spend on your product.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#177

Post by lynx23 »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #18
lynx23 wrote: post #3

This is why I never attempted to find a programming job. I am the typical nerdy polyglot, having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages. But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks. I envy those which managed to make this passion into a paying job without loosing the love for it.

This is exactly why I'm pursuing programming. I hate it with a passion. I'm an artist at heart, so programming is a great fit because, not only does it pay much more than art, it's completely artless, so it won't ruin my desire for making art at the end of the day.

Can you elaborate a little on why you think programming is "completely artless"? I hear many coders making comparisons of their work with art, so this kind of contradicts my intuition.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#178

Post by mx_02 »

bdw5204 wrote: post #39

Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make "what the market wants" rather than what you want, you're going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on "what the market wants".…

> Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. I

The author did try.

From the post:

> And yet, in spite of my passionate “passion”, I never made enough money to quit the day job. I followed my passion and all it gave my was wrist pain.

Writing for the market was their second attempt at trying to make money.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#179

Post by lynx23 »

pseudonym0us wrote: post #8
lynx23 wrote: post #3

This is why I never attempted to find a programming job. I am the typical nerdy polyglot, having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages. But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks. I envy those which managed to make this passion into a paying job without loosing the love for it.

>the typical nerdy polyglot, having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect > But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks You just play with programming languages on the surface. Programming is something different and chances…

Wait, I have never said anything about my supposed abilities or self-perceived performance regarding programming. How come you are diagnosing overconfidence from afar, without knowing anything beyond the few lines I've written? Being slapped with that link without any further comment feels quite out of place to say the least. Besides, this posting was about deliberately having decided to not become a programmer professionally. I am having a hard time to understand how you diagnose overconfidence from that, quite the contrary actually...

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#180

Post by gadders »

cushychicken wrote: post #129
gadders wrote: post #71

Kevin Kelly recently published a link to "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" which is about making a sustainable (but not massive) living from your hobbies. Might be of interest to somebody: https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/ismm.pdf

The author of ISMM, Don Lancaster, just passed away earlier this week. He was also an electrical engineer by trade, and made a good chunk of bread in the 70s and 80s by self publishing books like The TTL Cookbook and selling them by mail order.

Sorry to hear that. He seemed like a good dude just from reading his ISMM.
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