Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make "what the market wants" rather than what you want, you're going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on "what the market wants". And you're not going to be good at it because you're not a large corporation that has perfected a soulless formula so your work is just going to be a worse version of what the large corporations are doing (soon that stuff will probably be produced by AI rather than humans).<p>You don't turn a creative field into a career or a business until you know that what you want to make is going to be marketable or you are independently wealthy and don't need an income to live. And once you're successful in a creative field, resist the urge to pay attention to marketing data.<p>A creative who doesn't have the backing of a large corporation needs to lead (i.e. innovate, challenge conventions, etc.) not follow. That's because you can either be better, worse or different than the competition. If you're not different and you have a smaller budget, you will inevitably be worse. That applies to startups and even incumbent underdogs in any line of business.