Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make &quot;what the market wants&quot; rather than just making stuff he&#x2F;she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make &quot;what the market wants&quot; rather than what you want, you&#x27;re going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on &quot;what the market wants&quot;. And you&#x27;re not going to be good at it because you&#x27;re not a large corporation that has perfected a soulless formula so your work is just going to be a worse version of what the large corporations are doing (soon that stuff will probably be produced by AI rather than humans).<p>You don&#x27;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&#x27;t need an income to live. And once you&#x27;re successful in a creative field, resist the urge to pay attention to marketing data.<p>A creative who doesn&#x27;t have the backing of a large corporation needs to lead (i.e. innovate, challenge conventions, etc.) not follow. That&#x27;s because you can either be better, worse or different than the competition. If you&#x27;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.

I think people who have never run a business believe that running say, a bakery, involves baking all day. Anyone who has ever run a business should know that is false. Running a business involves doing all the stuff around the main task (marketing! accounts! infrastructure! customer support!) so that the people doing the main task can get on and do it.<p>If you understand this you won&#x27;t turn your hobby into a business and be disappointed.

I read a comment on hacker news that I cannot find now, but it resonated deeply with me. Don&#x27;t try to answer the question &quot;what do you want to be?&quot;, answer the question &quot;what do you want to do?&quot;<p>I answered the wrong question, I said &quot;I want to be a musician&quot;. And what I did was teach music I didn&#x27;t care for, perform music I didn&#x27;t care for, work for people and gigs I didn&#x27;t care for, made a salary I didn&#x27;t care for. I had high skills and expertise that wasn&#x27;t being used; I was never paid for playing one of Bach&#x27;s lute suites, I made a lot of money off of really simple wedding music.<p>What do I want to do? Play music that I&#x27;m passionate about. Make enough money to not be uncomfortable. Work in a field where expertise and knowledge is useful on a regular basis. I&#x27;m very happy now to pick up gigs for free because I like the gig. And as a side gig, I&#x27;m a full time programmer.

While I somewhat agree with the premise of this post, I think it is exacerbated by the fact that the author was trying to turn something like fiction writing into a business.<p>When I think of businesses that suck in terms of economics and chances of success, fiction writing is one of the first things that come to mind.<p>In general, you like things more when they make you a lot of money. A lot of fun things suck when you don&#x27;t make money...

&gt; As if the only value anything has is by how much dollars it makes.<p>Thanks for highlighting this corrosive attitude right up front.<p>The current US frenzy in this attitude started in the 1980s (remember Boesky, portrayed by Hollywood as Gordon Gekko: &quot;Greed is Good&quot;) and went into overdrive over the last two decades. But it&#x27;s certainly been popular in other times in US history, as well as elsewhere.

Am I the only one who detests the term &#x27;creative&#x27; 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&#x27;re not a creative then you&#x27;re not creative. We&#x27;re all creative in some way, so calling yourself &#x27;a creative&#x27; is just daft.

The article should be called:<p>&gt;Started doing Marketing for My Passion and It Appeared I Don&#x27;t Love Marketing

I used to do programming projects on the side for almost 10 years now. Programming has been my hobby, passion or time-pass whatever you could call it.<p>At the beginning, these projects was my vent from the day job to learn new tools&#x2F;tricks, try out random stuff, nothing specific. And I mostly don&#x27;t finish it, I just move on, because I didn&#x27;t have to complete those. Some were open source, many weren&#x27;t.<p>And then one of my project that I spent hardly few hours on got some 1000+ upvotes on ProductHunt. So many emails, new follows, it was exhilarating. It pegged me into submitting my next project to PH as well. Though it didn&#x27;t get as much recognition, it was covered by few tech journals, then some more followed. Suddenly I had users who were using something that I&#x27;ve created and I started charging for it. When it started making money, albeit little (i think at the most it was $100&#x2F;mo), it changed things.<p>A thought arose, &quot;I like building sideprojects, what if I get to do this full time!&quot;. It was exciting!<p>After that, I could never go back to working on my projects for just &quot;fun&quot;. It always had to have some business reason. Can it work? Is the idea worthwhile? What is the revenue potential and so on. Suddenly, I&#x27;m not just programming, but doing customer support, marketing, trying to promote the project, etc.<p>Eventually, I wasn&#x27;t doing the thing that I enjoyed and by pursuing it for commercial motives, it had become something else entirely.<p>I think many of us fall into this pit either by chance or being egged from outside. In my case, what I enjoyed was just programming. I conflated it with building a business. Unless you are famous or successful, almost anything that are pursued by passion alone, had to morph into something if you want it to support your life.<p>I just went full-time a month ago to try and build some profitable products. And I&#x27;m trying to get that &quot;fun&quot; part into the full-time thingy again. Can I truly work on things I enjoy, try new stuff and still make money out of it? Only time will tell. If the results don&#x27;t come, so be it.

The person who said this article should have been titled &quot;Started doing Marketing for My Passion and It Appeared I Don&#x27;t Love Marketing&quot; is right on.<p>I&#x27;ve met musicians who were totally uninterested in going to see anyone who wasn&#x27;t &quot;happening.&quot; You can&#x27;t blame them, since they&#x27;re trying to make a living.<p>I always thought about programming: &quot;I like it OK. Sometimes I like it a lot, but it&#x27;s a living. I don&#x27;t do it at home for fun.&quot;<p>If you don&#x27;t mind writing what sells, then that&#x27;s a living. F. Scott Fitzgerald tried selling out in Hollywood, but he&#x27;s not remembered for that non-passion part of his work:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;F._Scott_Fitzgerald" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;F._Scott_Fitzgerald</a>

I think there&#x27;s a way about going about these things that can make you hate it or enjoy it. I&#x27;ll share some of my story as an example of how I compartmentalize my different activities.<p>I code for myself, I have been since I was a kid. Often they&#x27;re little utilities that I find fun, interesting, or useful. Sometimes they&#x27;re tested, if for instance it&#x27;s something running part of my house. Most of the time they&#x27;re not because testing is arduous at times. I feel very attached to what I create for myself; it&#x27;s often creative or exploratory in nature. I enjoy this kind of code and share it freely, usually without a warranty.<p>I code for a large firm. The way I code there is entirely different. I&#x27;m very unattached to that code. It receives lots of criticism that I learn from but at the end of the day as soon as I put hands on keyboard that code is <i>their</i> code. I&#x27;m talented so I get to work on things I find interesting, but this job is a paycheck where I&#x27;m paid for meeting delivery deadlines at a standard of quality. As a result the code I write here is of a different nature, it&#x27;s easily maintainable, testable, and quite rote. This money funds my day to day life and savings account. I enjoy my coworkers and select them carefully to the best of my ability but it&#x27;s a job at the end of the day.<p>I also have a consulting business. I build solutions for clients or help them attain their goals. This job isn&#x27;t <i>just</i> a paycheck because I often work with small and medium businesses who don&#x27;t know what they need or how it needs to be done. I get more agency than I do at my FAANG job, but I&#x27;m still working to get paid according by meeting the clients goals. The code I write here is less rote than my enterprise code, but not as creative as my personal code. This money usually funds projects around my house or trips. I enjoy helping small businesses, but it&#x27;s a job.<p>I also have some for-profit ventures I work on with friends. I have much more agency here, but I&#x27;m working to serve the needs of potential and current customers. My quality standard is higher but it&#x27;s not enterprise code; it&#x27;s not quite as rote as my enterprise code but a little more on the creative side. The goal here is to eventually replace my corporate job. I have fun doing this because it&#x27;s with people I enjoy but it&#x27;s a job.<p>Compartmentalizing my commitment and knowing my desired outcomes has greatly helped balance this whole act. Outside of those things I have other serious hobbies: biking, gardening, camping, festing, recreational hallucinogens, spending time with my dog and my partner. Many of these overlap.

Kevin Kelly recently published a link to &quot;The Incredible Secret Money Machine&quot; which is about making a sustainable (but not massive) living from your hobbies.<p>Might be of interest to somebody: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tinaja.com&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;ismm.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tinaja.com&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;ismm.pdf</a>

<i>shrug</i> I turned one of my hobbies that I like into paying for other hobbies I like. The key thing I was relatively good at it so finding people to pay me to do it on good conditions was easy.<p>I might do that hobby far less in free time but it is far better than doing something I hate for a living.<p>So I guess key point here you need to <i>also</i> be relatively competent and the hobby has to be marketable. I&#x27;d be miserable if my ops jobs would just be managing someone&#x27;s shitty Wordpress instances all day.<p>As article&#x27;s author showed being mediocre in market with a lot of competition probably won&#x27;t get you all that much money, passion or not.<p>Also, it is sometimes worth to leave the &quot;business&quot; part to someone else and just find a job. I absolutely hate anything <i>around</i> a business so it is fine tradeoff for me to have someone else manage majority of it, find customers etc. rather than be whole one man shop.

The problem isn&#x27;t that you started doing it for money, it&#x27;s that you didn&#x27;t get much money in return. Your &quot;business&quot; has failed, but if you had managed to make money, you would&#x27;ve been satisifed.<p>Turning passion to business doesn&#x27;t sound right, as if you&#x27;re selling your soul, if you looked at it like &quot;I tried to make money doing it but the ROI wasn&#x27;t good&quot; like any other project, I feel like it&#x27;d have been more graceful.

My hobby is board gaming. I often see people on board game forums asking questions about wanting to open up a board game store&#x2F;cafe. My thought is always, &quot;Do you want to hate board games? Because that is the path to hating board games.&quot;

This blog is like Selfawarewolves ...<p>&quot;if you don’t have the big dolla’s in your bank account, you are a failure.&quot;<p>&quot;fiction that sells is in ... mainstream genres&quot;<p>&quot;one genre I love writing is comedy-horror .. books like these are not mainstream.&quot;<p>&quot;I never cracked the Amazon algorithm; I never got 10,000 fans on Facebook; I never got a huge email list of people&quot;<p>I mean, you can&#x27;t make up this lack of self-awareness.<p>If you&#x27;re going to write offbeat fiction, set your goals appropriately! Oh wait, the author did!<p>&quot;I was still hoping to make some money, [not] more than a fancy night out each month.&quot;<p>And then still wrote this blog!

I wish more people would write about “subsidizing” your hobby business with a more reliable source of income. If you’re a remote worker with some schedule flexibility, for example, you can probably run a low-contact business like a bookstore or art gallery without much interruption to your work day.<p>Just set up a desk in your shop and take a break when the occasional person wanders in. Not having to worry about your hobby business being profitable enough to pay the bills immediately - or ever - seems like a nice way to maintain your interest in it.

Yup.<p>That’s a big reason I’ve avoided paid gigs.<p>I got forced into retirement, but have since learned that’s one of the best things that ever happened to me.<p>These days, I do software for free, that is better than most commercial software, partly because I don’t need to make the types of compromises that profit-generating companies do.

I love programming (not just playing with code) and making excellent things with code, and electronics and mechanisms. I get paid to be good at it and help others do so as well, and I love that, too.<p>All that said, the author’s warning is well heeded. There are things I’ve built and run at my own expense. They could be commercialized, but that bit doesn’t seem like fun to me (I don’t need the money, so there isn’t a problem there to solve). I could give them to someone who would commercialize them, but that would <i>create problems</i> for the new owners and old users - so again, not fun.<p>Perhaps there is room for both - pure fun and enjoyment without obligation or commitment, as well as the commercial tangible benefit to others (i.e. paid for).

Same thing happened with me and music. Granted, I was a teenager and nothing too serious, but loved writing some songs, getting known songs in new arrangements.<p>It naturally progressed into forming a band, then we started doing small concerts. Before I could realized, most of my time was in spreadsheets to register the costs, the supplies we needed, transportation, on top of getting everyone to learn the same songs.<p>In the end I got so burned out that I stopped playing almost completely. Went from 3-4 hours a day to 0 over years.<p>Not the same as the author, but same case of trying to monetize a hobby completely killed the hobby for me.

In this case, the author chose to Self-Publish the book (amazon), and so they&#x27;d have to do their own Marketing, Networking, Editing, on-top of writing (the fun, creative part). If they&#x27;d had a Literary Agent, it may have worked out - Agent does the heavy-lifting i.e non-writing tasks.<p>The writing business (books) is extremely competitive - keep a main job, write on the side (hobby) until sales &#x2F; Agent &#x2F; Publisher pays enough for you focus on writing full-time.<p>Stephen King, &quot;On Writing&quot; covers this well, and it&#x27;s a joy to read.

Advice from a friend: Never do your PhD in a subject you love, because afterwards you&#x27;ll hate it.

I firmly believe that if you follow your passion and create something that solves a problem you&#x27;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&#x27;ll find others with the same passion who want what you&#x27;re selling.<p>That&#x27;s not the same as saying you can sell &quot;anything&quot;, or that you can definitively strike it rich doing so.<p>My simple math is this. There are 8 billion people on the planet. If you can create something that appeals to just 1 out of 800,000 people (or 0.0000025% of the population), you should be able to attract 10,000 people who at least follow you online. It won&#x27;t happen overnight, but if it&#x27;s something you&#x27;re passionate about, there are at least 10,000 other people who share that passion and are looking for what you&#x27;re offering.<p>If you can&#x27;t find a way to monetize 10,000 followers, you&#x27;re doing something wrong.<p>But if you&#x27;re not solving your own problems, and if you&#x27;re not pursuing your own passion, there&#x27;s no reason to assume others are passionate about the thing you&#x27;re just doing for the money. Even if they are, they&#x27;re likely to see through the facade.

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&#x27;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 relationship between paid work and unpaid work can be complicated.<p>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.<p>Working without pay is nice because it is lower stress. I generate new training material in this way.<p>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.<p>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.

My hobby&#x2F;passion became my day job. I&#x27;m no longer passionate about it, nor is it a hobby anymore. On the flipside - it&#x27;s a great job, pays well, and I still find the work interesting (just not enough to spend my free time on it).

I was passionate about music in high school, but went to college and majored in math and physics, while learning electronics and programming on my own. Now it turns out that those things are hobbies too. ;-)<p>I&#x27;m glad that I didn&#x27;t pursue music as a career. I actually make money playing, but not enough to support myself. I also do a lot of programming, but on my own terms, not as a software developer.<p>One problem that I think doesn&#x27;t get enough attention, is that most businesses <i>fail</i>. And most people hate working for failed businesses, especially ones that they can&#x27;t escape from.

It&#x27;s hard to imagine the economy of your hobby and all else that goes into any business. Taxes, marketing, customer service, and if you hire people, management. Very few enjoy these activities, let alone excel at them, especially with a hobbyists&#x27;s mindset.<p>The influencer is the closest to a marketing hobbyist, but from the many I&#x27;ve met, it often crosses the line into addiction and narcissism, which some see as talent.

I think writing is a very unique area, so the lesson here may not be generally applicable. Writing fiction is incredibly time consuming, and there’s no where at all to hide - there your work product is, for all to see.<p>Plus, you can’t scale it with help. Sure, there are editors and some people collaborate, but pretty much it is all on the author to produce.<p>Other businesses you can hire people to take some of the load off.

The headline is exactly what I&#x27;ve heard in many hobbyist forums for decades. (My particular sin is woodworking.) It&#x27;s almost inconceivable to me that this would be shocking or surprising to anyone deep into any particular hobby.

&gt; His formula was, in a nutshell: Create training courses and sell them to others, just as he was doing. And at least one of us made big money (hint, it wasn’t me).<p>There is something special about courses about getting rich by making training courses about anything non-self-referential that attracts a lot more suckers than the “real” training courses.

Turning something you do for fun into something you do to survive has always been a great way to sap the enjoyment out of it.<p>I&#x27;ve been told numerous times over the years to turn my photography into a business. Or my baking. Or my cooking. Or to start music tuition. I can&#x27;t think of anything I&#x27;d hate more.

Malcolm Lowley writes on The Literary Situation (1958; first published 1947):<p>&quot;Aside from the hard-working authors of textbooks, standard juveniles, mysteries and Westerns, I doubt that two hundred Americans earned the major portion of their incomes, year after year, by writing hard-cover books&quot;.<p>This was before television took over.

I had a similar situation with programming, I wanted to make a ton of money with a successful game, but I ended up quitting halfway through. I hated it. Eventually I settled on making a niche wifi app, and ended up enjoying most it. Didn&#x27;t really make a whole lot of money but I definitely learned a lot.

many years ago, i wanted to turn my passion in photography to my career. I did a few professional gigs and found out that it was turning out to be a job; and i was enjoying less of what i loved. in fact, it was making me hate it. I was wise enough at that time to stop it.

The market often doesn&#x27;t know what it wants until it taste&#x27;s something. I&#x27;m wary of any true &#x27;formula&#x27; for creating art. It must be hard for artists to be heard (ironically given our digital age). Patreon is a good model?

That person didn&#x27;t turn their hobby into a business, they turned their hobby into a cheap hustle.<p>I like that they sort of get that as a revelation towards the end of the post, but they let it go way out of hands, enough to ruin it.

Good to keep in mind for sure but don’t assume it can’t be done either. Currently I’m lucky enough to be managing it but there are two of us. Every day is great and I hope we can do this for a very long time.

Let&#x27;s think about what it means to &quot;make money&quot;. The phrase itself is already misleading because no one can make money, money is &quot;made&quot; by the central banks by changing some numbers in mainframe databases. These mainframes are connected to some local distribution banks like credit unions which then enable economic activity by business loans and other kinds of &quot;investments&quot;, e.g. local government services like street cleaning, trash pickup, churches, schools, electricity, sewage, &amp;etc. On top of this you have peripheral financial engineering like PayPal and credit cards.<p>At least that&#x27;s the gist of it anyway. So no one can actually &quot;make money&quot; but what they can do is figure out how to tap into the flow of economic services that will get them indirect access to some of the numbers in the database managed by the central banks. At this point there are one of two things you can do which is either do something that enables governments to manage their populations by moving people around and keeping them clothed, housed, and fed (essential services) or you can provide non-essential services like keeping people entertained when they&#x27;re not working and informing them of what&#x27;s happening in the world at large, e.g. podcasts and newsletters. The problem is the following, there is no way to get rich from doing any of this because all of these things are saturated with enough people such that the overall money pie is already split between them pretty evenly so none of them are going to end up rich in any meaningful sense. This means the only way to truly get rich is to operate on a scale that no one has thought of before, e.g. Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon, Salesforce, SpaceX, Dell, Nvidia, AMD, Arm, Raytheon, Saudi Aramco, &amp;etc.<p>Most of the time people are just fighting over scraps and the best they can hope for is some steady source of income that pays their rent and affords them some basic luxuries like visiting Las Vegas and watching a few acrobatic shows.<p>The people that are truly rich like Klaus Schwab operate in an entirely different world. Similarly for the executives at big pharma and big tech.<p>I&#x27;d say the game is inherently unfair but it still doesn&#x27;t prevent people from playing it to the detriment of all the players involved.

Typo: “if you love someone” should be “if you love something”. Am I allowed to point out a typo? If not I’ll delete this.<p>I liked the article, you’re a good writer.

Wouldn&#x27;t most people say something about spending all day doing this (and make money). The second being a side effect of the latter.

Basically if it&#x27;s a hobby you can say &quot;fuck it, i don&#x27;t feel like it today&quot; and if it&#x27;s a business... nope.

Maybe instead of asking “how can I monetize this” ask “who else might be interested in this and how can I reach them?”

Turning my hobby into a job made me hate it. Wish I&#x27;d become a plumber.

I’m also curious. What do you love now that you paused your writing?

The only way to avoid this is to make the business a hobby too.

comes down to each individuals relationship with money imo and for that I say &quot;its complicated.&quot;

Of course it did.

A-fucking-men.

Mmh, the real reason the author came to hate his passion&#x2F;hobby is that he could not make money from it. It’s that simple.