Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time

“Passion is a powerful tool, but it won’t guarantee that customers will love your product.”

This was not the first dinner with a hopeful startup founder seeking my advice that would come to a point like this. Nor the last.

I knew I would have to explain it another way. This time avoiding the phrase ‘passion is irrelevant’.

So I began again,

“You’re missing the point.”

Anonimus

“I can make this easier for myself. And if I can scratch my own itch, I can help many other people solve their same problem, too.”

I often have a hard time explaining this concept because no one wants to hear that passion isn’t the secret ingredient that makes a business a success.

Our startup media has idealized the way we talk about passion. And it leads entrepreneurs to believe that success is the product of following a passion and hustling their way to the top.

But this idea can be misleading and takes away from why you started the business in the first place: to solve a problem.

Let’s take, for example, the progression of my startup, JotForm.

That’s what I kept thinking as I worked on building yet another web questionnaire form. The problem was a request I kept receiving from the media company I was working for at the time.

Building these forms was a necessary part of my job, and I had no problem with doing it.

But a part of me couldn’t shake the idea that there had to be a more efficient way: a streamlined process that would convert the tedious hours of building online forms into time better spent on company productivity.

And 12 years later, JotForm has 3.5 million users who were all looking for this solution.