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Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

Is Patrick McKenzie (patio11) an avid bingo player that lives and breathes bingo?

No. It sounds like[1] he sort of enjoyed it, and a friend needed help making bingo cards. But he saw it as a good market opportunity, so he went with it.

In Mike Rowe's TED talk[2], he referenced a similar idea. He talked about a pig farmer who grew his small farm to being worth >$60M (he turned down a $60M offer) by getting scraps from restaurants and feeding them to the pigs, which I guess helped them grow faster and/or cut down on their food costs. He said that he asked the guy if he was passionate about his work, and the guy laughed.

Passion's great and all, and it does make things easier, but if you're reasonably disciplined and just out to make money, there's a lot of very boring markets (like bingo cards) that are ripe for disruption.

[1]: http://www.kalzumeus.com/start-here-if-youre-new/

[2]: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

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I agree up to a point. There's more to think about here than just finding the right market -- though that's a must.

The problem is that doing this while working full time is freaking hard. Doing an entire year of development after hours is just brutal. The longer the time to launch the more likely you are to not see it through to the end. So if you're taking on a project that's going to be in development for several months before you can even charge a dime -- finding something to get excited about is huge.

If it's just something you're going to build in a couple of weeks then that passion can totally be lacking there because marketing is going to be much larger part of the effort (it typically is but typically not to this extent).

In any case, I highly recommend sticking with something you can launch very soon. Probably no more than 3 months. I went 6 months and it was tough. It's an exhausting effort so take advantage of that motivational boost that launching gives you.

>"The problem is that doing this while working full time is freaking hard. Doing an entire year of development after hours is just brutal. The longer the time to launch the more likely you are to not see it through to the end."

I agree. Working that hard is difficult to keep up. 6 hours a weekday and 8 hours a weekend is 38 hours additional work a week...

I am currently working on an open source browser game as a hobby project, and am discovering that it is much more work to get it right than I thought. But I decided in the beginning that it should be live after the first week or so and now I publish the current alpha every other week. Sometimes, this requires more refactoring, but I think this is balanced by the fact that the game is already in a state where it is not a closet project.

If you make a commercial product, be sure to have potential customers and a marketing plan before you sink a whole year of work into it. A customer of ours spent half a million for a _good_ piece of software and now its been waiting for other a year to gain traction. Business customers are interested, but it seems like the marketing department is utterly fubared. They even cannot get around to set it up internally to solve their own needs...

Is Patrick McKenzie (patio11) an avid bingo player that lives and breathes bingo?

I have not run a bingo game in, hmm, 6 years or played one in 15. I'm passionate about many things, but bingo is not one of them, except insofar as it lets me experiment with things or lets me help teachers to teach better and more efficiently. You can probably tell, right?

Of course I sound totally focused on bingo when a customer needs to talk to me about it, but that's just acting for the job -- in another context I was the biggest geek around about edge cases in Japanese college entrance exams. If you asked me "How does the exam treat a deaf person with regards to English listening and why?" I would give an informed and enthusiastic answer to that, too, but I don't read commentary on the college exams for fun.

But it appears to me that he is passionate about online marketing/market testing and Bingo cards is just the vehicle he uses to get there. Conversely, my business idea is my passion and doing things like online marketing/market testing is the vehicle I will use to get there.

Yes, but this really depends on the person.

I used to rent out a single family house, with thoughts to expand to multifamily. Along the way I realized that I couldn't find any good software to manage small rental properties and that there was a good sized market for it (bounced the idea off other people I knew doing the same thing).

It's not a technically difficult application and there was definitely money in it, but as much as I tried to focus, my heart simply wasn't in something so boring and I eventually gave up.

Some of us do need to feel passion, or at least strong interest, to build a business around a concept.

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