The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey, it's Arvid and this is the Bootstrap Founder. A while ago, I asked my Twitter friends to tell me what the most annoying and most infuriating piece of entrepreneurial advice is that they ever received. And overwhelmingly, follow your passion stood out as one of the most frustrated item there that people just mentioned most of the time. And I've seen this particular piece of advice being given a lot by people who have made it, specifically people, founders who have had exits, successful entrepreneurs who found success in the field that they're passionate about. And I may have, to be perfectly honest here, from time to time hinted at the fact that this might not be too bad if followed carefully as well.

But today, I want to dive into why I think this is actually nefarious and dangerous advice when followed blindly, and more importantly, what it should and can be decoded into that's actually meaningful and helpful for you as a founder. And before we get to that, a word from our sponsor paddle.com. I'm using Paddle as my own merchant of record for all my software projects, and they take care of all the taxes, currencies. They track the client transactions. They update credit cards so that I can focus on dealing with my competitors and not with banks or financial regulators.

If you would rather just build your product instead of dealing with all these weird financials, check out paddle.com as your merchant of record. Now, right off the bat, this follow your passion advice, it's such an ambiguous term. What does it actually mean? Should I do the thing that I always like doing and try to turn that into a business? Or should I look at what people around me in my, I don't know, hobby or field of expertise are building and then build something like that or something for them, what does it mean?

And for most people, looking at it from their own personal perspective, follow your passion becomes, well, I have this certain thing that I like to do, a certain field or industry, be it professional or hobby, it doesn't really matter, something that I'm interested in and I want to do that for a living. I love baking, so I probably should open a bakery. Or I love doing yard work for some reason, so I probably should become a professional gardener. That is what most people think about when they look at Follow Your Passion. And in the field of digital businesses, it often turns into something like, well, should I maybe just become a content creator in that particular field or turn this into a software as

a service solution for people who work in that

field as well? And the more you think about this nuanced application of follow your passion or the more you want it to be nuanced the more it actually becomes useful advice. But if you only believe that it means do what you love and try to make money that's where things get problematic. Here's the thing most of the time we do things we love because they produce value that's not easily quantified. When we read a book or when I read a book I don't want to turn this into a monetizable experience right it's something internal.

I read this book. I enjoy the story. And for many years, I'll keep thinking about it. I keep referencing it. I integrate it into maybe the stories that I tell myself or the stories that I tell others when I recommend books or when I recommend stories.

But I can't say, like, I received $10 worth of joy from this. Or even for a particularly good book, like, I received a 100 or thousands of dollars of joy. That is not possible to quantify. It cannot be monetized or modified. You know what I mean.

Right? You cannot put a value to this. And this is why people who actually love reading often get encouraged to write books themselves, but they're actually not good writers. They're good readers. Or they don't have a good business sense if they are a good writer.

Nobody reads the book they're writing and all of a sudden they pour their passion, their energy into this and it's an unmonetizable skill for them. Yet, and that's the interesting part, here comes to nuance. Funny enough, the people who

do make money in this industry,

and I'm talking about writing books at this point, they're the editors, the cover designers, people doing layout, printing production, marketing for authors, distribution. These are the people who are monetizing an existing valuable thing for others. They're not creating the product in the creative sense, the passionate sense, this ingenuity of creating something completely new. They're mediating the industry they're pretty much middle people they're sitting in between the others and doing work for them that they couldn't do if you're a good writer but you're not good at marketing a book marketer an author marketer will charge you money to do the work that you're not good at. So that is something where all of a sudden follow your passion when looked at through this third party lens becomes interesting.

And let me draw another example from my own experience here because it has to do with hobbies and maybe not necessarily just with pastimes. I paint miniatures. It's one of my personal hobbies. I've been doing this for decades at this point. But here's the thing.

I don't want somebody else to paint the miniatures for me. Right? That's my thing. I like this. I don't want somebody else to tell me exactly what to do.

This joy of discovering how to do it and the act of actually doing it is what I enjoy. So I don't want to turn this into a monetized hobby or even like an augmented hobby by having somebody else do the work for me. I don't wanna paint miniatures for others, not for money. Joy, I feel, is painting them for myself and having this collection, playing games with them. And the act of painting and collecting and gaming is not something that I want to outsource to somebody else it's intrinsically valuable to me so I don't think this can be monetized externally nobody could build a business to do this for me because I need to do it for it to feel valuable but for a hobby like this and you will find this is quite similar to the other example I gave you I need supplies I need paints I need brushes I might need ideas on which colors work with other colors I need additional materials to put on the basis of a miniature to make them look like realistic than a swamp or something, sand, foliage, that kind of stuff.

That's the stuff I need to buy, and that's the stuff that I'm giving money to a company for. And here's where that gets interesting. There's been a recent development in that particular hobby in the field of three d printing. People have started making money supplying STL files. That's the kind of source file for models that I can plug into my own resin three d printer and then create these miniatures myself in my own hobby space.

And that's a digital business. STLs for little trees, for figurines, for terrain pieces. Suddenly this is an industry picking up significantly and digital business owners can participate. Because most people in this hobby, most people who have this hobby, they're not three d modelers. They couldn't and wouldn't want to model a tree or a rock face or something but we certainly can print one on the machines that we can buy for this so I'm willing to pay for that.

Suddenly there's a supply and demand mechanic. Can you create these models? Can you source them and resell them as collections? Build your forest with 20 different kinds of trees and foliage and then maybe can you print them for others and sell them? That's a business.

And that is following passion. It's just following and facilitating the passions of others. There's this cottage industry inside the hobby. It might not be a massive market yet, but if you're actively interested in doing this, it's a market you can tap into and you'll find this in most non professional activities there's always something auxiliary but still in high demand because people can't do that particular thing themselves but they need it for the other thing they want to do So when someone says follow your passion my question is not what is your passion? My question is who else has this passion and what skills do they need help with?

Where do they face challenges? What can you do in your own way that only you can do to make these challenges more feasible and manageable for them? That's really the magic about building a business out of your hobby or your passion. Build a business that helps other people with their hobby or passion. Your joy of baking, well that's limited to the people in your area who will buy your cakes from your store but build a digital community for professional bakers or semi professional bakers, amateurs for that matter, to learn new skills, to teach each other, to organize baking competitions, well that scales very differently and if you help organize baking challenges at your local country fairs that kind of stuff suddenly there's a process you can help with right you can facilitate with a digital product that previously had been done by pen and paper, a process somewhere in there.

That's where follow your passion becomes interesting because you're replacing existing jobs to be done that are competing with like DIY solutions or pen and paper solutions. And that's where monetization can happen because you're just making it easier and more accessible. So just doing your thing, the thing you like for money, that rarely works. So my personal take on following your passion is this, find the place where other people have the same passion, then solve their problems. Typical entrepreneurship.

But then it goes back to the regular ways of building a business. Right? You start observing your market. You define your market as the people who are like you, but lack the skill that you have to solve these problems. You start talking to these investigate what other solutions people already use in the space.

And you know this because you are part of that market. You have insight. You would be one of your own best customers, but you're not. You're building this for others. You're trying to make something sufficiently useful to others and you're the best judge of the first iteration right the first thing that you feel okay this will convince people like me to at least give it a try and after that you listen to the market like you would with any other product and you step away from being too intuitive about what should be done.

Think about writers again here. Most people are pretty good at putting ideas to paper but few are good at meticulously reading every single word in the sentence and marking the ones that don't resonate. And obviously more tools are becoming able to do this. But for us as software founders, that's an opportunity. Can you build a much cheaper AI editor or a proofreader?

Or is that a service that people would pay, I don't know $50 per draft for to get like a 99.5% proofread thing that they can then self publish that's likely think about maybe even bigger is this a service that agencies that do proofreading and editing services could pay a pretty hefty monthly subscription fee for so they would get this 99.5% correct draft that their proofreaders would only have to skim through at that point that's also quite likely there's already something happening in most spaces where people try to facilitate services and if you're a software entrepreneur you can help either to get the person that has the problem to their final result or if it's a complex enough job you can help the people sitting in the middle facilitating the process and make their own internal processes easier so yes follow your passion but don't just do the thing that you like for money find others with the same passion make them pay for a skill at solving their problems that only you can solve in that particular way. The beauty of this approach is that you understand this market intimately, right? That would be one thing that few other people can really say.

Like if I were to build some kind of business in the miniature hobby space, I really know this market. I've been doing this for twenty years in my free time. I surround myself with that stuff all the time. I get it. Somebody coming from the outside, what they would have to spend a couple of years to even get to this point where they're just versed enough in the lingo of the community to be able to talk to people but you know the pain points because you've experienced them you know what solutions people currently cobble together because you've tried that stuff out yourself and you know what actually would be valuable because you're embedded in that community and you see what people do you're not trying to monetize your joy directly you're not turning your hobby into work you're building tools and services that enhance other people's experience off that same passion You're solving problems for your tribe, your people, the ones who get excited about the same things you do.

So that's how you follow your passion without falling into the trap. That's how you build this business that both is meaningful to you and actually profitable, hopefully, if there is budget in this community or in the field you're in. That's kind of how you stay connected to what you love while serving those who love it too. And that I think is advice worth following. That's it for today.

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