Turning your hobby into a business is every persons dream isn’t it?
I know we all love crashing in front of the TV after a long day with a bottle of wine, don’t we? The catch is there’s very little ways of making money from doing that (unless you’re a wine taster for a very chilled out vineyard owner, or you’ve found a way of making money out of being a couch potato?).
The Magdalene Sisters psp Even if what you enjoy doing you’ve seen other people make money at, there’s no guarantee that you will. You can play the piano, so can thousands of others (I can’t if that helps!), and only the very best play in bars or on the Royal Variety Performance!
I’m lucky (I know a few people would disagree!), I had a hobby a long while ago – tinkering with websites and computers. I’m reasonably good at it, I’m a Software Engineer for a big company. At some point in that hobby I decided to setup a little offering for a few close friends, I’d host their websites for them (which meant if I charged them enough – I might even get mine hosted for nothing!). This went on for a while.
It then got a little bigger, I was hosting websites for friends of friends. Fixing up sites as necessary for people, and often getting asked to do custom work. Before I knew it I wasn’t just a reseller for a hosting company, I was a hosting company renting a server.
Today I still run BetterWebSpace, it has quite a few servers, and a lot more customers. I knew it was getting big the day I turned round and said “I don’t know every customers first and last name, and which server they are on!” – it might sound mad, but for a long while I really did know that! |
What’s the secret of it?
My passion is getting it right, I’ve seen so many people ripped off by hosting companies in the past, and I can’t bear it. If I can’t deliver something for you – I’ll be honest and tell you that. On the other hand if I can help you out – I will.
I’ve thought about getting out a couple of times (I’ve even been asked to once or twice) – but the big stumbling block is that this is my passion (whether that passion be the tinkering with websites, or the getting it right for my customers), I couldn’t stand to see someone else running it, or hear that it was suddenly being run into the ground.
Could your passion become your new career, with a lot of hard work? – Hey, I never said it was easy doing this!
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