Turn Your Passion Into A Profitable Startup

People are creating profits from their passion everyday. Creative content is taking over because creators creators now have the variety and availability of technology platforms to easily fuel their creativity. Areas of passion are becoming profitable businesses everyday. YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and even Oculus Medium are channels where people are curating and creating content in areas they’re most passionate, from virtual reality to cooking, photography and more. These platforms serve as discovery tools to help people with similar interests connect. When today’s biggest digital businesses are all focused on rich content to drive engagement, it begs the question: How can I turn my own ideas into a successful business?

1. Nurture Your Creativity

Write down your ideas as it helps remembering ideas better as is suggested not only by multiple studies but also by many personal experiences as well. You can keep a journal and jot down your ideas the moment you have them without losing any time. Another effective way to nurture your creativity is to turn to the people around you. By using your community to reiterate and refine on your creative ideas, it can make those ideas (and your content) even better.

2. Find Your Niche

Building a business is about creating an experience and connecting it with people who care and have the same passion. Once you’ve fed your creativity, the next step is to define your business value, or niche. What differentiates your ideas and content from others in the space? If you can define your niche correctly, that’s where the money is, people will pay for access to content that’s unique and aligned with their own passion. An important framework to remember is: the more specific the content, the more opportunity to build the business. Take publications like Cranes Today Magazine, the leading journal for the crane and lifting industries, or Tom Tom Magazine, the only magazine in the world dedicated to female drummers. Start looking within relevant communities that would be interested in your content. Platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Reddit can seem overwhelming at first, but you can use them to your advantage: engage with shared content enthusiasts and discover sub-communities through hashtags, explore pages, liked posts and more.

3. Leverage the Right Technology

Technology plays a crucial role in helping creators build their businesses by distributing and monetizing their content. Identify the right tools that will help you share your content with your audience. A lot of this depends on what space you’re working in. To design visual content, many choose Adobe for easy sharing; to create objects in virtual reality, Oculus Medium is a popular choice and community; for game developers, Unity is a platform with tools that help “artists and developers create cinematic content and gameplay sequences”; of course, there’s YouTube to share video content. Whatever the platform, make sure it’s helping you get more eyeballs on your content. Your last and critical step is to identify the platform that will help you monetize, whether it’s through ads, subscriptions, individual sales, patronage, commerce, or another channel. Making a profit as an artist and creator from your content is not selling out, it’s helping your business grow while connecting with others and doing what you love.