My Hobby
In looking at all the new Web stuff that’s out there, I am amazed at the diversity and also at the number of rehashes of old applications. I am beginning to get to know some of these entrepreneurs and trying to find out what their motivations are for building whatever it is they’re working on. Some of them clearly have more defined goals in terms of problems they are trying to solve, what opportunities they see.
Others…don’t have such clearly defined goals. You ask them some standard questions about business models and user retention, or scalability and it is clear that these issues have not been thought through yet.
But no matter what, there is huge interest and determination in working on these apps, and the passion is evidently there. Just like having a hobby.
So yes, these apps pass the hobby test. But they can they go beyond being just a hobby?
Because I can…
I suspect that some entrepreneurs build these things because they can. Because the world of Web 2.0 it is really easy to build some really complex applications and you don’t need an entire team of engineers to do some very interesting things. You weld maps with some other app and get a new way of approaching the same problem. Never know if you’ll come up with something totally disruptive and it takes off.
Certainly many build them also because they are trying to satisfy some need that they have. They see some specific problem in the world and they solve that problem. These can be services or parts of technologies, or even reinventing some old thing again.
Almost universally, they have this hope that they will make the big score by selling their little app to some big company and live the life of luxury forever.
Does the world need yet another Google Maps mashup?
Sometimes I wonder about creativity in this new Web 2.0 entrepreneurism. There seem to be multiple versions of almost every app out there. For example, one way to be “cool” is to do something interesting with Google Maps. So, yes, creativity in mashing-up maps with some other app, but creativity in services? It seems like people take the same service or some existing and redo it in their own image.
As a user, how I am supposed to distinguish between one app or another when they look almost the same? Sure, I could sit at every app and try it out for an hour, but I don’t think I would spend my time to do that to figure out why something was better in some tiny but important way.
Money Making Hobby?
Some people make money off their hobbies. You do something you love doing for the sake of doing it, and then a business springs out of that. But many people have hobbies that don’t make money.
The big question is: in the world of Web 2.0, how does one take their hobby and make the leap to business? On the internet, users can’t distinguish if something they encounter on the Web is a “hobby” (in the context of what we’re calling hobby in this post), or a real business. So that’s one problem.
Another problem is that it’s really hard to execute. Putting your website up is one level; staying in it, developing a business model, and keeping it going for a long time is another level.
I think the main goals of our venture fund will be to discover:
1. If this is a “hobby”, can it become a business, and one that has big enough potential for us to invest in?
2. Does the entrepreneur have enough vision, experience, or potential to be able to evolve this from a “hobby” to a business?