51–60 of 98 posts
The author has some good points. What can look like a hobby to some people can be seen by the creator as part of their mission in life, or a calling card that is part of what makes the creator unique. If you feel that way about something that doesn't monetarily pay off, does that make it a hobby or something else? A company in a tangential space approached me the other day for a second time to discuss whether I could…
The author mentions bike repair as a hobby, and the issue with trying to turn that into a monetized hobby will quickly become apparent once you talk to some experienced full-time bike mechanics. As a hobbyist your scope is almost always rather narrow, i.e. you may know all about how to repair your particular model of bicycle, and perhaps a few others. In contrast a professional will deal with dozens of models and wil…
As far as monetizing something like wheel building, of course the more experience you have the faster you will be at it. In the end it is all about what the customers want, and they might value having you do it over the more experienced person for different (and possibly illogical) reasons than you might think. It might even boil down to simple availability or your location being more convenient.
Make sure you have proper insurance!
One key point here is how comfortable you are with pressure and deadlines. Hobbies don't have deadlines but clients/users/stakeholders do. No matter what value you provide the hobby-centric approach of doing it on your own time, own pace might not work out.
I think this is partly because these are generally considered luxury items rather than necessities, but also partly because many regard the inner workings of a mechanical watch to be magic.
As someone with a somewhat successful side project, I highly recommend monetizing it. However, you should choose a small enough price that you don’t feel like you owe customers fast support or every feature they ask for. (In some cases a donation button may be better) Also, when you start expecting your project to meet income requirements, it can take the fun out extremely fast. Part of the fun is being able to work…
If you are not a charity, do not call it a donation. Call it a tip.
Except that if you do that, you're a dilettante, not a craftsman. If you take on a project to fix somebody's bike, and you take your time so as not to stress yourself out, your customer is going to be pissed off at you: they want their bike fixed, that's why they're paying you money that they earned doing things that stressed them out. You should feel a sense of obligation when you take someone's money: not an obligation to chase your own sense of joy, but to do the thing they paid you to do.
That's why I think turning your hobby into a job (which is what you do when you take money for it, no matter what you want to call it) is a bad idea. The author dismisses it as a cliche, or as bullshit, but it's the most valid argument against what they're saying: making your hobby your job means it's not your hobby anymore.
If you have a lot of money — enough to lose it on a failing business — it's okay to be a dilettante, take your time, and appeal only to a small number of customers. If you have a lot of hobbies, and can afford to sacrifice one of them to make it a real profession that pays your bills, while getting your pleasure in other areas, then that's fine too. But if you have one big thing you love doing, you will probably stop getting the same kind of pleasure from it if it becomes your full time job. This isn't true in every case, but in the majority of cases it is.
A hobby should be something you can do for yourself. Something you get pleasure / relaxation / a welcomed distraction. out of doing. If you take up painting (art, not houses) you should know you will never be Rembrandt and it should not keep you from painting (Unless painting houses is your hobby) With things like (marathon) running, hiking, it is easy to meassure Objective progress and qutie hard to moneteize. If yo…
Well, no. You can do sooo much here. Log your hike, provide coordinates of off-the-beaten-track routes and sites, provide info on trail conditions, run team events, gear reviews, first aid courses...
Also, who said I can't be the next Rembrandt? Kandinsky is only one of many proofs that that second sentence of yours is off the mark.
I've actually just started work on making piste maps better for snowboarders. Making bank off that would be ace, if not well OK then. Being defeatist because the probability of failure is bigger than success is defeatist, no?
Ah, the old phrase "my avocation is my vocation" I'm very blessed to be able to tell people this. When I was growing up, my grandmother had a radio scanner in her small town Virginia home, and I was fascinated that you could listen in on what the police and fire departments were doing on a daily basis. My parents bought me a radio scanner a few years later and as a young boy I followed the rabbit hole of radio commun…
I'm still not sure if I want to try and monetize that or not. People have expressed interest in buying them, but I've actually done the electronics production line thing in a long-ago internship and I know that it really is a job. Also, it's not like I'm going to be retiring off the proceeds of selling weirdly-shaped 3-button wired mice with no scrollwheels, it's a hell of a niche.