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The article isn't saying you shouldn't be passionate about your work, rather that you shouldn't restrict yourself to selling in markets where you have a persona
by cjy 14y ago
The article isn't saying you shouldn't be passionate about your work, rather that you shouldn't restrict yourself to selling in markets where you have a personal interest.
I have mixed feelings about this. I started a website about senior care giving because I thought there was a market need and advertising rates were/are incredibly high. However, writing about senior care as a 27 year-old male is mind numbing. The site failed because I had no motivation to create content for it. So, the lack of passion can definitely result in failure.
It seems to me that the key to success (as noted by the article) is finding where you can add the most value. I'd say that:
Value Added = Function(Knowledge, Work, Market Need)
If you work on something you are passionate you have a head start on the first two. But, this doesn't matter if the market isn't there. The trick is finding market needs where you are uniquely suited to add value. In a soundbite, you shouldn't follow your passion, but you shouldn't ignore it either.
- toumhi 14y agoI agree. Failed several times at that. Started by providing gift certificate templates for small businesses and ended up writing endless series of blog posts about how to create gift certificates. Then another one about weight loss, because I'm interested in sports, before realizing writing about body mass index and the like is not my cup of tea either. In a second phase (august 2011-februray 2012) I developed and sold a SaaS product for small businesses in France, to find out I hated selling to this market who didn't have a clue about anything. In retrospect, here are the various things that sucked: - writing content about something that didn't interest me the slightest just because there was a market need. - spending too much time writing content VS engineering something I could be proud of (I know a startup is 10% dev and 90% marketing, but as a developer, it's more interesting to develop a SaaS product than an affiliate site or an ecommerce store for example) - targeting a market I'm not interested in: non-technical small businesses in France are incredibly hard to convince to buy an online solution from a small player (and being a player of 1, I qualified as such)
- astrofinch 14y ago>advertising rates were/are incredibly high How did you learn this?
- cjy 14y agoBy looking at Google Adwords. In senior care, there are a bunch of referral companies that get big commissions when they place a senior in a private facility. They bid up the price of advertising.
- cageface 14y agoOn the flipside, a lot of things may excite your passions in the abstract but make for really shitty business experiences. For example, I care about music more than just about anything else, but spending the last year trying to write & sell music software has not only eaten up all my music making time but also worn me out on the whole music business. In hindsight I would have been better off working halftime on boring but well-paid consulting gigs writing business software and spending the rest of the time travelling, relaxing and doing what I really enjoy.
- nmridul 14y agoYou should have hired someone to do the writing.