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"Richard Price is the founder and CEO of Academia.edu.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nMy philosophy is that the best way to find your passion is to\u00A0experiment\u00A0until you get there.\r\n\r\nI began my career selling banana bread and started several businesses before I finally decided to found Academia.edu, a startup that has raised $18M in venture funding and provides a platform for academics to share their research papers freely.\r\n\r\nThrough this process of\u00A0experiments, some which failed and some which were successful (but not inspiring) I have discovered a method that ultimately helped me find my passion in Academia.edu. The main idea is to do a series of low-risk\u00A0experiments.\r\n\r\nDon\u2019t get too attached to each\u00A0experiment: take a lesson from it, close it down, and start a new one.\r\nA series of cheap experiments\r\nAs a doctoral student at Oxford, I started a banana cake company in my spare time called Richard\u2019s Banana Bakery. I quickly learned that people didn't buy pastries every day of the week and that the ticket price of $1.50 a slice was too low, so overall margins were pretty low.\r\n\r\nI morphed Richard\u2019s Banana Bakery into a sandwich company, Dashing Lunches. Sandwiches were attractive because they had a higher ticket price, making the margin higher, and people bought them every day. I ran Dashing Lunches for a year, and then decided that it was going to be hard to scale.\r\n\r\nA lesson I took was that I wanted a highly scalable business, and I started thinking about the Internet.\r\n\r\nWith some friends at Oxford, I started a housing search site for students, a kind of Craigslist for Oxford, called\u00A0LiveOut. I ran the site for about a year, and found that the idea wasn\u2019t super scalable: it involved an on-the-ground sales team persuading real estate agents to add their properties to the site.\r\nThe more you experiment, the more you learn about yourself\r\nFrom here, I decided to create a pure internet business with no offline component. I closed LiveOut and started a Facebook app called PeopleRadar. PeopleRadar was a Facebook application that allowed people to rate their friends based on attractiveness. The application grew fast, becoming the top app on Facebook for nine months in Facebook\u2019s early days.\r\n\r\nPeopleRadar was scalable and growing. I could see that financial success was a possibility. The problem was that I wasn\u2019t proud of what I was doing.\r\n\r\nThat\u2019s when I had an &amp;quot;aha&amp;quot; moment: in order for me to be passionate about my business, I should something that would improve the world, and that I was proud to be part of.\r\n\r\nThis was when the concept of Academia.edu came about. The site combined both scalability and stood for what I cared about.\r\n\r\nCollege was an easy place to do\u00A0experiments\u00A0and fail often since I didn't have extreme financial responsibilities. My prior ventures had all been funded by the venture before - Richard\u2019s Banana Bakery funded Dashing Lunches which funded LiveOut, and so on.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s a little different after college. You have to be a bit creative to figure out how to get the\u00A0experimental\u00A0approach to work.\u00A0Academia.edu was higher stakes but I knew I had to go out and raise capital and do the venture full time, but this time, because I was so passionate in the mission, I was driven to make it successful.\r\nDon't\u00A0overthink\u00A0it\r\nBeing an entrepreneur gets a lot easier after the first phone call. Your project will take on its own momentum if you just take a first step.\r\n\r\nIt is like swimming in cold water: the first 30 seconds are very cold, and many people get out immediately.\u00A0But for those who stay in, what is amazing is that after 30 seconds of swimming in cold water, your body starts to warm up, and you start feeling absolutely fine - not cold at all.\r\n\r\nA lot of people wonder how they are going to find their passion. It\u2019s hard to find it by just reading books, Web articles, and talking to friends. My experience has been that over the course of a few years, you can try out a few\u00A0experiments, and you\u2019ll start to get closer to something that really resonates with you.\r\n\r\nYou don't need to accomplish anything extravagant on the first try. Something as small a banana cake company that took $150 of startup capital can easily help you find what you truly believe in.\r\n\r\nImage credit: Shutterstock/jonson"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2014/03/06/find-passion-benefits-business-experiments/>