Don't Follow Your Passion: A Smarter Way to Find a Product to Sell

http://www.shopify.com/blog/6187532-dont-follow-your-passion-a-smarter-way-to-find-a-product-to-sell

by icey • 14 years ago

103 33 14 years ago

Originally written for the eCommerce market, it contains a lot of good advice for startups like measuring market demand, doing competitive research and - probably most importantly - making sure you're adding value by solving a problem faced by your customers.

NathanRice3• 14 years ago

It is very easy to find a niche related to something you actually like. The title of this article is a troll.

But, that being said, all you people who can't do market research, please follow this advice to try and chase the low hanging fruit. I'll continue turning over rocks to find gold. Stuff like this just keeps you the hell out of my way.

spiredigital6• 14 years ago

Sure, it's easy to find a niche related to something you like but the point of the article is that - if you want to build a profitable business - your personal interests shouldn't be the barometer by which you make a decision.

Instead, you should look for a product/niche/problem that is well suited for building a successful business around.

NathanRice3• 14 years ago

People who are motivated primarily by profit have missed the bus and are sitting in the terminal at 3 AM in the shivering cold.

Create something beautiful, and learn how to package it. By starting from the premise of "how do I make money" you ensure that you will merely be spewing more inane filth into the world. This is why I hate the internet marketing jerks who spend their days making landing pages for affiliate marketing products while performing SEO to pollute keyword index rankings. People like that might as well not exist, and in fact it would be better if they didn't.

clarky07• 14 years ago

hopefully you are less of a dick to your customers in these awesome niches you are serving.

NathanRice3• 14 years ago

I will be a dick repeatedly and to the greatest of my ability to people who create only to make money. Create something beautiful and figure out how to market it, don't find a market and try to capitalize on it. Steve Jobs called people who try to squeeze markets rather than create great things "sick," "demented," and "parasites." In this case I think he's right.

imgabe3• 14 years ago

I guess the formula for a mildly viral blog post is just to misinterpret a popular saying so you can disagree with it. I really dislike it though.

"Follow your passion" is not advice given in response to the question "What product should I sell?" Usually it's in response to "What should I do with my life?" It doesn't help people differentiate between selling Star Wars figurines vs. something else. It's meant to help you decide between selling products online at all versus, say, writing novels or being a carpenter, or social work or some other calling.

Yes, if you take the advice outside of the context it's intended, it does become quite terrible.

spiredigital6• 14 years ago

I'd respectfully disagree. The original context of Cuban's advice is here:

http://blogmaverick.com/2012/03/18/dont-follow-your-passion-...

..and an especially relevant excerpt related to your comment:

"Why? Because everyone is passionate about something... ... [things] that we really really want to do with our lives. Those passions aren’t worth a nickel."

His overall point is that instead of blindly following after your passions and "hoping" things will work out, you should count on effort and hard work.

Technically, you're right - Cuban wasn't talking about specifically picking an eCommerce niche. But he does make the great point that if you're successful at something - regardless of what it is - you usually become passionate about it.

The problem faced by many new entrepreneurs is that their passion-based business plan doesn't get traction, and they give up. But if you start with a effort and market based business plan, a new entrepreneur is much more likely to succeed. And when they're successful with their business, they'll become very passionate about it.

imgabe3• 14 years ago

That presumes that running a business is something you want to do in the first place. In that case there's a more general passion "running a business" that you're already pursuing. Not everyone necessarily wants to do that.

I'd also disagree that if you're successful at something you become passionate about it. Cuban's basing that on what exactly? You can point to any number of people who left various high paying jobs in fields they didn't like and ended up being much happier doing work they cared about in a field they were passionate about.

jetti• 14 years ago

I think even interpreted correctly it is horrible advice for the majority of people. There are some passions that are just not marketable to a successful business. As an example, as a teenager one of my passions was philosophy such as Nietzsche, Kirkegaard and the like. It would be very hard for me to parlay that passion into a successful venture. (Although maybe I just lack creativity)

imgabe3• 14 years ago

The end result of every passion is not necessarily a business venture. To successfully pursue a passion for philosophy, you'd likely end up as a professor and/or author, for example.

DanielRibeiro• 14 years ago

Or, as Bret Victor said once[1], you can also follow a principle:

There are many ways to live your life. That's maybe the most important thing to realize in your life, that every aspect of your life is a choice. There are default choices. You can choose to sleepwalk through your life, and accept the path that is laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to. If there's something in the world that you feel is a wrong, and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle, and you can fight for a cause. So after this talk, I'd like you to take a little time, and think about what matters to you, what you believe in, and what you might fight for.

[1] http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2012/03/principle-centered-...

eightbitman• 14 years ago

I think it's okay to opt out of fighting. Too much of the narrative in places like this refuse to acknowledge that it's also fine to live without trying to rub up against something the whole time. There's nothing wrong with not having big ambitions, and there's nothing wrong with the people who don't have them, either.

dllthomas2• 14 years ago

> "Follow your passion" is not advice given in response to the question "What product should I sell?" Usually it's in response to "What should I do with my life?"

Unless you are okay with living off of handouts of one form or another, "what should I do with my life" and "what product should I sell" have substantial overlap. In modern society, you've pretty much gotta sell something to someone.

wslh• 14 years ago

If you start with "what product should I sell" and have a moderate exit you can continue with "what should I do with my life" and be really passionate. I think this solves the issue: exit once with or without passion and then follow your passion.

nickpinkston• 14 years ago

Yea, I came in here to say this. While commenters below bring up good points about how to sustain your business being a big problem, I have to say that many of us do not derive our pleasures from just making a big company - we need to achieve something for humanity or we can't stop thinking about something.

For me - it's passion first, and then "how can I make this into a business"? Fortunately, if you're passionate about something, you tend to find things that need solving because you hit the wall with the current system.

Sure, Star Wars figurines aren't a huge market, but what about making figurines/toys in general? What are we pursuing the creation of big business for if not solving real problem? If you want to make ::millions:: selling marked-up HDMI cables with TVs have fun not changing anything...

kwekly• 14 years ago

Yet you're just feeding the same beast you claim to dislike.

Yes, the post has a bait title, but it's not entirely irrelevant and -- more importantly -- the article has real substance. It's structured lazily as a list but the overall point it's making is coherent, the arguments are fairly convincing and the writing appears to be mostly original.

You've managed to distract away from all the content and draw attention instead to the meta-trash -- all the while complaining about the existence of said "meta-trash" ! (At least you've generated a nice bit of irony for me to feel clever about spotting)

cjy2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

>advertising rates were/are incredibly high

How did you learn this?

cjy2• 14 years ago

By 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• 14 years ago

On 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• 14 years ago

You should have hired someone to do the writing.

programminggeek• 14 years ago

This is good advice to the millions of people who start a blog/website/ecommerce store/hobby/business that they want to make money from. It's not always about what you love, it's about what you can sell. Sometimes your passion can become a profit center, but not always.

toddmorey• 14 years ago

It doesn't matter if you sell diapers or dentures; if you've built a successful ecommerce business around a niche, I promise you'll become passionate about it.

I totally disagree.

Yes, you need to head-check the ideas you are passionate about and see if they can really grow into viable businesses. But you also need to check seemingly lucrative ideas and see if you are passionate enough about the industry and the concept to stick it out for the long term. You are entering a marriage. Can this idea be both a great, supportive partner and your best friend?

After the initial buzz of building a business and the early success, what's left over is a lot of time focused on your product and industry. If you don't like golf, you probably shouldn't start a golf-focused e-commerce site.

spiredigital6• 14 years ago

OP here. I definitely understand where you're coming from but I've personally experienced something different.

One of the eCommerce niches I entered based on research (not passion) was trolling motors. Starting out, I had absolutely zero interest in them. None. Never even used one in my life.

But after selling them for a few years and building a business around them, I've come to be a trolling motor geek and even enthusiast. Driving down the road, I'll crane my neck to see what type of motor the boat in the other lane has, and I enjoy talking with customers about them on the phone.

Is it really trolling motors I'm enamored with? Not really. They're just the vehicle I've picked to build a business around. As I mention at the end of the post, passion is 100% essential for success. In my case, I'm just passionate about building eCommerce businesses and some of that eventually leaks over to my product of choice.

qeorge2• 14 years ago

Does anyone have experience with drop shipping? Specifically, how to connect with a supplier?

I get the concept, but I have no idea where to find a good supplier. We'd love to do an e-commerce play but don't have anything (physical) to sell.

All the info I've found online has been spammy (e.g., lists of drop shippers for sale on Digital Point).

spiredigital6• 14 years ago

Hey qeorge! Original author of the Shopify post here, and I do have a lot of experience with drop shipping.

The best ways to find suppliers are:

1) Google, but you'll need to dig deep. Most real drop shipping suppliers usually don't rank well as they are notoriously awful at marketing and SEO

2) Contact the manufacturer and ask which wholesalers they use to distribute their products. There's a good chance some of these will drop ship.

3) Drop shipping directories like World Wide Brands. There are a lot of spammy, low-quality lists out there so I'd stick to these guys if you do go this route.

If you'd like to learn more, I've written a detailed eBook on eCommerce which includes an entire section on how to find and evaluate drop shipping suppliers. You can download it for free below:

http://www.ecommercefuel.com/profitable-ecommerce-ebook/

Also, I just finished a screencast on finding drop shipping suppliers which I'll be posting to my blog in the next few days.

Hope this helps, and best of luck!

qeorge2• 14 years ago

Thank you so much! Wow. Just seeing this response.

I'll definitely check out your eBook. Thanks again!

richardw• 14 years ago

This was on HN a month or so ago, and has a lot more detail about many of the same points:

http://www.ecommercefuel.com/profitable-ecommerce-ebook/

One of the points raised: you're going to get interested in whatever the niche is, if you plan on competing effectively. So choose wisely because you'll be immersed in it.

Don't Follow Your Passion: A Smarter Way to Find a Product to Sell

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