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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

#141

Post by quickthrower2 »

siva7 wrote: post #108
a13n wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For all i’ve seen over the many years in the industry i’m pretty sure founders who make only things they’re interested in are a pretty small club. The vast majority of all the crap and startups you’re seeing here are doing exactly what they believe is „what the market wants“ because that’s what they’re being taught all the time here. Heck, most of Show HN gives me rather „what the market wants“ vibes let alone YC app…

With ChatGPT it is worse: it is a stream of bots based on what people hope the market wants

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

#143

Post by quickthrower2 »

kelnos wrote: post #138
wvenable wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 want to make a business, you must make what the market wants. Making your own stuff and trying to make money from it is possible, but it's no longer a business. I'm a professional software developer and a hobbyis…

But you don't know what the market wants. I would think that a primary goal of turning a hobby into a business is to answer the question, "is my hobby something the market wants?" And sure, the answer might be a resounding "no", but you can change your focus once you figure that out. And that change in focus might make you hate it, which sucks.

You doing your hobby is never what the market wants. There might be a 10% intersection? Unless your hobby is business itself or you change what you want to what you actually need to do to make money.

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

#144

Post by poisonborz »

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.

I never really saw this. But I always noticed if a product follows a sharp vision of an individual/dev team, and not sales/research. Even if the product was no fit for me, it immediately felt to be more sympathetic, and even of better quality.

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

#146

Post by gusgus01 »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #133
htss2013 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing that society still puts so much stock into these types of impossibly confounded studies. Ok, so they found that people who are top earners are no more satisfied with their jobs than bottom earners. Might this be because top earners tend to be the types who neglect other aspects of their lives? Or who are hypercompeitive and are unlikely to be satisfied at any level, otherwise they would have stayed where…

> It's amazing that society still puts so much stock into these types of impossibly confounded studies That particular example was a meta study of over 100 other studies But sure, I'm sure your expertise in study design and statistics is enough to invalidate their work and the work of hundreds of other researchers simply because you don't agree with the conclusion.

This whole discussion reminds me about the conflicting studies around the correlation or lack thereof of money earned and happiness. There was recently another paper about it that re-analyzed the data, so not a meta analysis, but an interesting example of study design and statistic interpretation: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120#executive-s...

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

#147

Post by no_butterscotch »

lostlogin wrote: post #107
brianpan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I felt when I got one of the original Roombas. It's great if you don't like vacuuming but really like robot cleaning and maintenance.

I like trying to reseat it on the charger multiple times per day.

is this still a problem?

I had a Roomba 10 years ago and that was the usual problem I had with it. That and having to pick up a rug so it wouldn't get caught.

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

#148

Post by NovaDudely »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #78
JimtheCoder wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a lot of fun things suck when they make you money" That has not been my experience...they become more fun.

You're an outlier. Studies have shown repeatedly that monetary compensation undermines intrinsic motivation: https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv > The authors synthesized the results from 128 controlled experiments. The results highlighted consistent negative effects of incentives — from marshmallows to dollars — on intrinsic motivation. These effects were particularly strong when the tasks were in…

John Carmack learned this the hard way with Armadillo aerospace. When the team went from hobbiests to employees, productivity either stayed the same or declined despite their hours effectively doubling.

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

#150

Post by shadowfoxx »

glitchcrab wrote: post #112

Am I the only one who detests the term 'creative' as a noun? It seems to have come into being in the last few years and I just hate it. It feels like if you're not a creative then you're not creative. We're all creative in some way, so calling yourself 'a creative' is just daft.

I'm also not a much fan of 'creative' as a noun for much of the same reasons. I feel this way about how we commonly use 'talent' to mean - "They are magically gifted in ways that are innate", as if they rolled 18's in all their stats, and not "This person has achieved a level of skill that is remarkable."
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