5 ms·

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",

by a13n 3y ago

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.

Helmut10001 3y ago
I see two conflicting motivations here and everyone has to decide for a tradeoff between these two: Being happy and being rich(er). 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.
slimsag 3y ago
There's a reason those are lucrative businesses, regulation around them (correctly) prohibits new entrants. Probably not a great idea for a small team to try and enter those markets unless you genuinely have some secret sauce / niche. 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.
version_five 3y ago
There's something to be said for building out your vision and testing whether others are interested. It was refreshing to see the grandparent post because the usual startup advice seems to be to abandon your vision entirely and build some average SaaS thing that's a composite of other successful things. (a) I don't think that actually works and (b) if people want to do that, why not just get a job, if you're effectively going to be just as constrained. It's much more fun to try and take a risk, if entrepreneurship is the space you want to play in.
pessimizer 3y ago
> they overfocus on "what you are interested in" instead of "what the market wants" 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.
- TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
  I agree with pretty much this whole chain of comments, at least in spirit. 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.
  - ido 3y ago
    As a fellow someone who turned his interest into a business (that I'm still currently running) I agree it's a challenge but having a career as an employee is also challenging in a different way. 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)!
siva7 3y ago
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 applications.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  With ChatGPT it is worse: it is a stream of bots based on what people hope the market wants
jrockway 3y ago
I disagree with that. If you make what you want, you at least have one user. If you make what you think other people want, you might end up with zero! 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.
- edmundsauto 3y ago
  Nobody wanted those products but they did want the problems solved that those products addressed. IMO, focus on the problems - those often exist before the solutions have manifested.
  - wruza 3y ago
    The tricky part is to learn the exact problems and not some confused second-hand ideas about what/where they are. Sure there are people with good consulting instincts, but in general you can only solve problems that you’ve experienced firsthand.
  - kagevf 3y ago
    Excellent point!
- type0 3y ago
  Nobody wanted a horseless carriage in the beginning either
- janejeon 3y ago
  > If you make what you want, you at least have one user 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.
kelnos 3y ago
I think the calculus changes a bit when you're trying to build a business around a hobby. If the entire point is to see if your hobby is going to make a good business, then you will naturally start with "what you are interested in", and the goal of the exercise will be to see if that matches up with "what the market wants". 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.
poisonborz 3y ago
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.
hw 3y ago
They are lucrative because they are drab. No one wants to build the unsexy stuff such as enterprise tax systems. It’s also normally one that requires deep technical knowledge outside of tech

by a13n 3y ago

Helmut10001 3y ago

I see two conflicting motivations here and everyone has to decide for a tradeoff between these two: Being happy and being rich(er). 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.

slimsag 3y ago

There's a reason those are lucrative businesses, regulation around them (correctly) prohibits new entrants. Probably not a great idea for a small team to try and enter those markets unless you genuinely have some secret sauce / niche. 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.

version_five 3y ago

There's something to be said for building out your vision and testing whether others are interested. It was refreshing to see the grandparent post because the usual startup advice seems to be to abandon your vision entirely and build some average SaaS thing that's a composite of other successful things. (a) I don't think that actually works and (b) if people want to do that, why not just get a job, if you're effectively going to be just as constrained. It's much more fun to try and take a risk, if entrepreneurship is the space you want to play in.

pessimizer 3y ago

> they overfocus on "what you are interested in" instead of "what the market wants" 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.

TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
I agree with pretty much this whole chain of comments, at least in spirit. 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.
- ido 3y ago
  As a fellow someone who turned his interest into a business (that I'm still currently running) I agree it's a challenge but having a career as an employee is also challenging in a different way. 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)!

siva7 3y ago

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 applications.

quickthrower2 3y ago
With ChatGPT it is worse: it is a stream of bots based on what people hope the market wants

jrockway 3y ago

I disagree with that. If you make what you want, you at least have one user. If you make what you think other people want, you might end up with zero! 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.

edmundsauto 3y ago
Nobody wanted those products but they did want the problems solved that those products addressed. IMO, focus on the problems - those often exist before the solutions have manifested.
- wruza 3y ago
  The tricky part is to learn the exact problems and not some confused second-hand ideas about what/where they are. Sure there are people with good consulting instincts, but in general you can only solve problems that you’ve experienced firsthand.
- kagevf 3y ago
  Excellent point!
type0 3y ago
Nobody wanted a horseless carriage in the beginning either
janejeon 3y ago
> If you make what you want, you at least have one user 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.

kelnos 3y ago

I think the calculus changes a bit when you're trying to build a business around a hobby. If the entire point is to see if your hobby is going to make a good business, then you will naturally start with "what you are interested in", and the goal of the exercise will be to see if that matches up with "what the market wants". 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.

poisonborz 3y ago

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.

hw 3y ago

They are lucrative because they are drab. No one wants to build the unsexy stuff such as enterprise tax systems. It’s also normally one that requires deep technical knowledge outside of tech