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 do agree 'what you are interested in' is often wrong, that's a good starting point for ideas but after that you need to see if there is an actual market there.
Do what the Market wants means making a tradeoff in favor of earning more (and becoming rich(er)).
Doing what you want to do means making a tradeoff in favor of your happiness. You will perhaps earn less, but what you do is more in tune with your values.
A tradeoff is not always required and both of these motivations may become synergies, but in the authors case, I think this is what happened.
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.
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 your top feature requests will be right out of the gate.
Integrating the two effectively while actually getting something out the door can be a real challenge. I have criticized many firms and offerings for not having “basic feature X,” but as someone who is building a product that’s effectively never complete, I’m sure someone could say that to me too, about at least a few things. Some come immediately to mind.
And I’m still sort of surprised at times by what my own customers do and do not want or ask for, or even care about. When my interests are aligned with theirs, the product/service can move forward really quickly. When they’re not, it can be a struggle to iterate effectively.
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)!
Nobody wanted an open-source Unix-like OS, a keyboardless touch screen with third-party apps, a mini hard drive with a display and headphone jack tacked on, maps that could be infinitely panned instead of clicking arrows, etc. But they ended up being some of the defining products of our time.
The worst case of working on your own thing is that you make something nobody else wants. The worst case of working on something you think other people want is that nobody wants it, and you get burned out.
IMO, focus on the problems - those often exist before the solutions have manifested.
This is it.
This is how I approach in writing software.
99.9% of the stuff I write is going to have one user. But it's one more than zero, and in the 0.1% of the cases where it does have >1 users, well, I call that a success.
That feels like a reasonable approach to me, though -- as with anything -- you need to know to pull the plug as soon as you have some confidence that it's not going to work out, which might be harder to do for a hobby, since you presumably have some emotional attachment to it.
> Some of the most lucrative businesses are...
You don't really need to aim for "most lucrative". If you're trying to promote "hobby" to "business", I think you should just aim for "good enough to pay the bills and give me a comfortable lifestyle without working myself to the bone". Starting out with a goal like "I'm going to turn my hobby into a blockbuster business that gives me FU money in 10 years" is probably unrealistic, but that's ok. More modest goals are just fine.
Of course the solution is to be financially independent already... but then you're not actually living off your art anyway.
> PASCAL: may I say something that I learned, without being too big?
>
> PASCAL: A guy goes out to eat in the evening...
>
> PASCAL: after a long day in the office, whatever. Go ahead.
>
> PASCAL: He don't want on his plate...
>
> PASCAL: something that he has to look and think, "What the fuck is this"?
>
> PASCAL: What he want is steak. This is a steak.
>
> PASCAL: I like steak, you know?
>
> PASCAL: Mmm, I'm happy!
>
> PASCAL: Do you see what I mean?
> PASCAL: But don't get me wrong.
>
> PASCAL: I think that your brother is good, goddamned chef.
>
> PASCAL: Maybe the best I ever see.
>
> SECONDO: He is the best.
> PASCAL: Yes, but,
>
> PASCAL: this is what I have to say to you.
>
> PASCAL: Give to people what they want.
>
> PASCAL: Then later, you can give them what you want, eh?
>
- Big Night (1996)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 hobbyist software developer and while I could have sold some of my hobby software I explicitly choose not to. The reason is that selling something immediately creates responsibilities that, for my hobby, I just don't want to have. A business is something of it's own beast.
Right, we get it - but it's not binary, and in turns out there's considerable room for nuance. In fact some of the happiest and most genuinely successful people I know got there from figuring out how to navigate this valley, and knowing when to trust their gut.
It also has a lot to do with taste -- specifically for stuff that is awesome and cool, but just a bit below the radar, as it were.
Perhaps some of this discussion is just talking at cross-purposes because the fundamental thing that we're discussing is not the same.
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.
100% agree. This is also why so much music is commercial
I use to make and sell a very specific piece of hardware. The only reason I started a shop was to sell my surplus. It cost roughly the same for 1 as it did for 20. So I started selling them for $2 more than I paid and sold out. Then I did it again, and again. I sold about 100 units all together and never once did I hate my hobby during this time. At the same time, it never paid my bills. Nor did I ever think of quitting my job.
Is there a name for flipping a hobby into a full blown career? Does Flanderization fit?
I had to stop after the whole shipping shitshow during covid. Prices in my country have not recovered yet.
People think they can get more cake by appealing to everyone but in the result make products that appeal to no one.
The main problem I see over and over again with creatives when it comes to marketing is not being specific enough. Nothing appeals to everyone.
You got to know you target audience. What age range, gender, general demographic are you aiming for? What other books are in the niche you are targeting? What do your reader like about them? What is your unique selling point?
You might think that marketing a book with broader appeal would be easier. No. The more specific you can get, the easier it will be. People will gladly throw their money at you for finally scratching their specific itch, you just gotta find them.
Chances are if you like something, there are other people out there who also like that thing and are willing to pay for it. Sure, there is a tradeoff, as smaller niches mean a more limited market and some niches can be too specific to be economically viable but let's be honest people overestimate how unique they are most of the time.
But yeah, marketing sucks and not everyone is or wants to be good at it.
If you are very good at something besides singing (everyone can hear if someone is good at singing or not) there is no audition you can go to, you have to be your own judge.
The reality is that people will only read the top 10 books, or play the top 10 games, there's like a normal distribution curve where the most people gravitate towards the best sellers.
Embrace and welcome any good talent in your niche, they will grow the market for you, and even if you only get the scraps, you could still make some money just by being in the same niche as someone extremely talented, because if people really like the nr 1, they will also try 2, 3, 4 next best in that genre.
As another poster noted, just chasing market fashions is a crap existence, better left to soulless corps that can burn workers in pursuit of the dollar.
The good thing is that those same soulless corps will very seldom invest in something visionary, something that no one has done before. So the field is wide open to the pioneers.
(Caveat: while I believe this strongly for software, I'm not sure how it translates to fiction writing, the OP's domain).
It doesn't sound like that's the case. This specifically talk about stories that they wrote for fun and for themself.
I think the story is a little bit more interesting because even if you make something exciting for yourself, that doesn't mean it sells
Even as a career you have a similar problem. You have to do what your employers want and it needs to be done right the first time.
A hobby should not be turned into a business or career unless you can only focus on what you like.
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.
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.
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.
You don't turn a creative field into a career or a business until you know that what you want to make is going to be marketable or you are independently wealthy and don't need an income to live. And once you're successful in a creative field, resist the urge to pay attention to marketing data.
A creative who doesn't have the backing of a large corporation needs to lead (i.e. innovate, challenge conventions, etc.) not follow. That's because you can either be better, worse or different than the competition. If you're not different and you have a smaller budget, you will inevitably be worse. That applies to startups and even incumbent underdogs in any line of business.