If you often daydream while spending time on your hobby, one way is that you may keep on doing it, or alternatively you may actually turn your hobby into your next business. One thing for sure is that you may not have to find a business partner or co-founder for your business, and you won’t rush for a company incorporation.
Identify your end goal right from the very beginning. The upside is that when the end goal actually scares you, you would have already given up no longer than 3 days of starting your new hobby business venture. Then you won’t have to end up wasting a lot of your rather precious time.
Brainstorm all the possibilities that you could make money from your hobby. Don’t kill the possibilities. Actually many people have done it. When you start a serious business just for making money, then it rarely ends up that the entrepreneur is able to make any money at all.
Make sure you will still enjoy your hobby when you are going to do it for your monetization. It is not simply sitting at home, getting relax and going nowhere with it.
When it is your hobby, it means you really like it a lot. When you like something a lot, you won’t need anyone else to motivate you for doing it. When you do it a lot, then you will probably get good at it sooner than people who have no feeling towards it. That is the upside about turning a hobby into a job or a career. Now it is even better that you are converting it into a monetized business. Make sure you can get really good at doing. Otherwise, don’t quit your day time job yet.
Usually you won’t be able to skip this step. You will write a business plan about it. This way, you will start adopting a business mindset around your hobby. It is also better to make the plan “visual” for possible angel investors to easily understand it.
When it comes to marketing of your company, brand, product, or project, keep this in mind: You can be the best in the world at what you do, but if you don’t market your business, your competitor will still do his marketing work, and your customers would have become the customers of your competitor. Small businesses and new businesses do not have the resources and power of the large corporate in marketing. But there are different ways/methods that smaller companies can do well to gain visibility from potential customers about their new products, and more. It is time to build a local community when practicing the acts of marketing.
Once you have started your marketing operations, make sure you create a brand, stick to it, and include it in your overall marketing plan.
While doing it as a hobby, you may have already gained quite a few or a group of acquaintances. But when you do it for your and get your first paid customer, that is going to be a milestone.