So I see you don't want to start a successful business.

This is the "secret". Without a huge follower base, it's really hard to do sales without spending loads of money on marketing.

An alternative though is to jump on a hype train and pray that the momentum will pick you up.

I think there's something to be said for effort to outcome ratios being the limiting factor.

This is why making something you genuinely enjoy can be the best approach. Because the reward you get is the satisfaction of having done it and the money you make plays a much smaller role.

Some of the most successful people I know had the initial reaction of "oh this is getting too much attention I should stop" when their things initially became popular before leaning into the interest and making businesses out of them.

There's a reason common start up advice is "solve a problem that you have."

I've tried a few things that I genuinely enjoyed and I wish I haven't, they were also problems I personally had.

Now I think the best question to ask before building anything online is: "can I sell this to people?" If the answer is no or maybe, then consider it a hobby.

Unfortunately sales is not solved by building things I love.

A regular job has similar issues. Instead of marketing it is meetings, estimates, status reports, process, politics, etc.

This isn't the same thing. All of those things are part of the overall effort to engineer some kind of software artifact, which is what I enjoy doing. A meeting trying to come to consensus on an approach or to prioritize competing work or what process we should be using to avoid production issues or keep documentation up to date is not the same thing as running a twitter account or experimenting with different headlines or copy. Both kinds of work are very important, but the first kind is what I enjoy doing and the second kind feels like pulling teeth to me and that makes me bad at it.

That is a good point. That said there are many "non-tech" meetings you have to endure at organizations. However I concede that the amount of time for those is much less than the time spent on the marketing side of a business.

Yep, I won't work anywhere that doesn't have a good marketing department that I'm not involved in. Marketing is super important, usually more important than what I'm doing, but I'm not the right person to do it.

I think everything you're saying is exactly right. I think most developers wouldn't be happy doing what needed to be done to be successful (mostly the emphasis on marketing).