Passion is overrated. Build a better ‘mousetrap’ instead

Photo credit: Peter Heeling

Alexander is a TIA Star Contributor and publishes exclusive, high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from TIA Star Contributors here.

“I can’t find an idea that I’m really passionate about,” founders say to me. I yawn and almost go on a monologue that starts with “Passion is overrated. Find an idea that makes sense instead.”

In this article, I’m going to explain why. I’ll save you my monologue.

Passion

“I’m super passionate about secure, online identity management!”

Do you believe that? No, neither do I. But if I was the founder of Okta and my company was publicly valued at US$3.92 billion, I’d sure as hell be passionate about it then.

The secret is this: You can get passionate about anything if it’s working!

If you’re doing house moving, cleaning, on-demand groceries—whatever—and it’s making you a ton of cash and growing, f*** if I care, I’m making money bitches!

Startups are 80 percent the same. You have:

• A problem to solve
• A solution that solves that pain
• A large market of people willing to pay for that solution
• A business model that pulls in revenue
• A go-to-market strategy that is scalable, so you get lots of awesome but cheap customers
• Special sauce, so you actually are defensible (like a network effect)
• And a great team to execute on all this “fun”

But startups are not all sunshine and roses. You deal with the same crap whatever you do; your problems will just look a little different. For example, an executive at a beauty box company once said, “I’m sick of all these stupid people complaining on Facebook that they got a different face cream or shampoo than another in their box this month. They are just samples!”

Running a startup is almost all the same, but you may have extra departments—some more important than others:

• Customer care (to deal with the annoying people above)
• Marketing (to find lots of these demanding people)
• Operations (so you keep the ship running so these people don’t complain)
• Tech for your back and front end (who are typically spared the annoying customers)
• Product (to annoy the tech team and tell them what to focus on 😉)
• Finance (to ensure the team gets free pizza on Friday)
• Then maybe supply chain management, buying, logistics, customer success etc., depending on your business model

That’s a lot to deal with, but it’s all the same. Every business model is going to have stuff you don’t like. But if you’re successful, you can hire people so you don’t have to deal with certain things over time. If you’re not, you’re stuck explaining to your customers, “Try to customize the box to user profiles. I’m sorry you got one brand over another…” forever. FML.

Mousetraps

How to build a better mousetrap

What passion is code for