Dear 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 the one that frustrated them most.
I’ve seen this particular piece of advice being given a lot by people who have made it—successful entrepreneurs who found success in the field they’re passionate about. And I may have, from time to time, hinted at the fact that this might not be too bad if followed carefully. 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 can be decoded into that’s actually meaningful and helpful for you as a founder.
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The Ambiguity Problem
Right off the bat, “follow your passion” is 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? Should I look at what people around me in my hobby or field of interest are building and build something like that? What does it really mean?
For most people, looking at it from their own personal perspective, “follow your passion” becomes: I have a certain thing that I like to do, a certain field or industry—professional or hobby—that I’m interested in, and I want to do that for a living. I love baking, so I should probably open a bakery. I love doing yard work, so I should probably become a professional gardener.
In the field of digital businesses, it often turns into: well, should I become a content creator in that field? Or should I turn this into a software as a service solution for people who work in that field as well?
The more you think about the nuanced application of “follow your passion,” the more it actually becomes useful advice. But if you only believe it means “do what you love and try to make money,” that’s where things get problematic.
Why Passion Doesn’t Equal Profit
Here’s the thing: most of the time, we do things we love because they produce value that’s not easily quantified. When you read a book, you don’t turn this into a monetizable experience. It’s internal. You read a book, you enjoy the story, and for many years, you’ll keep thinking about it. You’ll integrate it into your own stories or into the recommendations you give to others. But you can’t say “I received $10 worth of joy from this”—or even for a particularly good book, hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of joy. It cannot be easily monetized.
This is why people who love reading often get encouraged to write themselves. But they might not be good writers, or don’t have good business sense as writers. Nobody reads the book they’re writing, so suddenly it’s an unmonetizable skill.
Yet funny enough, the people who do make money in this industry are often the editors, cover designers, people doing layout, printing production, or marketing for authors. These are the people who are trying to monetize an existing valuable thing for others.
The Miniature Painting Revelation
Let me draw from my own experience here. I paint miniatures—it’s one of my hobbies. But here’s the thing: I don’t want somebody else to paint my miniatures for me. I don’t want somebody else to tell me exactly what to do. The joy of discovering how to do it and the act of doing it is what I enjoy. So I don’t want to turn this into a monetized hobby. I don’t want to paint miniatures for others. The joy I feel is painting them for myself, having a collection, and playing games with them.
The act of painting, collecting, and gaming is not something I want to outsource to somebody else. It’s intrinsically valuable to me. But for a hobby like this, I need supplies—paints, brushes, ideas on which colors to use, additional materials to put on the bases of my miniatures to make them look more realistic, like sand or foliage. This is stuff I need to buy. This is stuff I’m giving money to.
And here’s where it gets interesting: there’s been a recent development in my field with 3D printing. People have started making money supplying STL files—the source files for models that I can plug into my own 3D printer and create in my own hobby space. That’s a digital business. STLs for little trees, figurines, terrain pieces—suddenly this is an industry picking up significantly.
Why? Because most people in this hobby aren’t 3D modelers. I couldn’t model a tree, but I can print one. So I’m willing to pay for this. Suddenly we have a supply and demand mechanic. Can you create these models? Can you source and resell them as collections? “Build your forest” with 20 different kinds of trees and foliage? Can you print them for others and sell them?
There’s a cottage industry inside the hobby. It might not be a massive market, but if you’re interested in doing this, it’s a market you can tap into. You’ll find this in most non-professional activities—there’s always something auxiliary but still in high demand because people can’t do it themselves.
The Real Question Behind Passion
When someone says “follow your passion,” my question isn’t “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 to make these challenges more feasible and manageable for them?
That’s really the magic about building a business out of your hobby. Build a business that helps other people with their hobby. Your joy of baking? That’s limited to the people in your area who’ll buy your cakes. But building a digital community for professional bakers—or amateurs, for that matter—to learn new skills, teach each other, organize baking competitions? That scales differently.
Help organize the baking challenges at local country fairs. Suddenly there’s a process you can help with, that you can facilitate with a digital product that previously had been done by pen and paper. That’s where “follow your passion” becomes interesting—when you’re replacing existing jobs-to-be-done that are competing with DIY solutions or pen and paper solutions. That’s where monetization can happen.
From Passion to Problem-Solving
Just doing your thing for money rarely works. My personal take on “follow your passion” is this: find the place where other people have the same passion, then solve their problems.
But then it goes back to the regular ways of building a business. You start observing your market. You define your market as people who are like you but lack the skill to solve these problems. You start talking to these people, investigating what other solutions people already use in this space.
You know this because you are part of that market. You would be one of your best customers, but you’re not—you’re building this for others. You’re trying to make something sufficiently useful to others, and you are the best judge of the first iteration. After that, you listen to the market like you would with any other product.
Think about writers again. Most people are good at putting ideas to paper, but few are good at meticulously reading every single word in a sentence and marking the ones that don’t resonate. Obviously, more tools are becoming able to do this, but for us as software entrepreneurs, that’s an opportunity. Can you build a much cheaper AI editor or proofreader? Is that a service people would pay $50 per draft for? Likely. Is that a service that proofreading and editing agencies would pay a hefty monthly subscription fee for so they could get a 99% correct draft that their proofreaders would only have to skim through? Very likely.
The Path Forward
So yes, follow your passion—but don’t just do the thing you like to do for money. Find others with the same passion and make them pay for your skill at solving their problems that only you can solve in a particular way.
The beauty of this approach is that you understand the market intimately. You know the pain points because you’ve experienced them. You know what solutions people currently cobble together because you’ve probably tried them yourself. You know what would actually be valuable because you’re embedded in that community.
But 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 of that same passion. You’re solving problems for your tribe, your people, the ones who get excited about the same things you do.
That’s how you follow your passion without falling into the trap. That’s how you build a business that’s both personally meaningful and actually profitable. You stay connected to what you love while serving those who love it too. And that, my friends, is advice worth following.
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