Being a founder is a lifestyle. You adopt a certain language, you end up running into a lot of the same people at various industry events and parties, you value certain things and feel certain pressures. There is a lot of pressure to not just be a founder, but to be a “successful” founder. Raise money, get users, make money, grow the product, etc.

A lot of people who just think the technology is cool arrive into the startup scene and are suddenly thrust into a world of growth, sales, optimizing for revenue and retention and virality and all of this stuff that is absolutely crucial for a company to succeed. There is a known road to take, and if you want to raise capital and beat your competitors it absolutely appears like you have to follow it and not veer too much.

But a lot of the engineers, researchers, builders and creators just want to create. In the ideal, they are making things for themselves, their friends, their families and communities and fanbases because they enjoy creating and love the feeling of being seen as a creator of that work. Making money is a necessity, so their vision is shoehorned into what will be profitable.

By the end, many of these people are spending most of their time supporting others on the team, dealing with user requests, doing sales and marketing, and generally not creating. They have built a business around what they love, and they are so busy that they no longer have time to do the thing itself.

Before being a startup founder, I was a musician. I had a cool band. I really loved the music we made, we had a small following and a booking agent and manager and we got to experience glimpses of success, rubbing shoulders with our heroes and such.

But it was the same thing as startups. I spent very little time making music. I spent most of my time doing email, social media, promotion, booking, making merch, productizing the music into albums and PR content, etc. We’d go on tour and play 12-14 songs in every city, sometimes in different order or throwing in a couple new ones were were working on. It wasn’t making music with my friends. It was a business. And it was a hard business, at that.

I don’t believe that everything needs to be or should be a business. Yes, it is very hard to find the time to do what you love all the time unless you can make a living at it, but in my experience what ends up happening is that you don’t do a whole lot of what you loved about it in the first place. For some people, starting and running a business is the goal, and doing a product they personally enjoy and would use is somewhat secondary. I would argu that these are the people that should actually run businesses, since it will make them happy.

For others, I think it’s okay to consider your work a hobby. For some reason, it feels shameful to have a hobby, and culturally we have come to associate this with things you do in private by yourself. But really, if you approach your work as a hobby, as a thing you enjoy, it enables you to build an entirely different type of thing, with a different focus, and to appeal to a very different group of people.

One trend is hobbyists starting Discord servers and communities and just talking about everything they are working on and discussing their interests. Some of these become businesses, and they have fairly tight loops for validation, marketing and initial buyers. However, in a community environment, selling things usually isn’t the goal, and delivering the value to one’s self and the community can be very fulfilling.

A good example of this has been the generative AI communities around Stable Diffusion and such. There are a lot of hobbyists who have become sort of influencers and tastemakers– a shining example would be someone like Camenduru. Also a lot of programmers like Automatic1111 and Comfy who have created open source projects that have become the backbone of a lot of the tools people use to make generative art. ComfyUI just raised… $40m? something like that? A lot of money. But that wasn’t the goal. The money came from the fact that they had built something for themselves that a lot of people ended up wanting as well.

It can be hard to really, really know what you want, and it can change. Often, what we want is deep things like acceptance, financial security, knowing our place, being wanted and valued by others, and this bubbles up into trying to create something or pursue some ambition. On top of that, there is a lot of subtle societal pressure to pursue certain paths, and this can really cloud what we really want.

But I think that most people just want to chill and build and not have to monetize every aspect of their passion. I think it’s okay to be a hobbyist, and we should have an open mind that just doing something for fun could but doesn’t necessarily have to be where the next unicorns come from.