Passion is the moat

Earlier this year, I built a directory site for golf simulators, but I don’t golf. I picked the niche because the keyword research said it was easy money - low keyword difficulty and decent search volume. I shipped it over a few weeks, felt great, and then never thought about golf again. After the builder’s high wore off, I didn’t want to do the actual work of keeping it alive - adding new locations, fixing broken affiliate links, and writing content. So I didn’t. And within a few months, the site had 0 traffic.

I’ve shipped a handful of these over the past two years - random SEO sites, mostly chasing keywords I had no real connection to. They all died the same way - usually a few weeks after launch, when I realized I had no interest in doing maintenance.

The two side projects I have that are actually working - remotepmjobs.com and bibleplan.app - have something the golf directory didn’t: I actually use them. I use BiblePlan to track my own Bible reading. I’m on Remote PM Jobs constantly, and on a random Tuesday night I’ll find myself scrolling LinkedIn for new PM job posts - not because I have to, but because I like reading about companies, seeing how they describe their cultures, and finding the ones still defending remote work.

In my last post, I said the moat for Remote PM Jobs was the data - clean, structured, categorized. That’s definitely true, but I’ve been thinking about why my other data-intensive projects died while this one is still going strong. The honest answer is that I cared more. I’ve been adding companies and tinkering with my enrichment pipelines for weeks without much traffic to show for it, mostly because I wanted to. The willingness to keep going simply for my own enjoyment is what made the moat possible at all.

Passion alone doesn’t save you, though. If you’re building something nobody wants and trying to charge for it, loving the project doesn’t create revenue. You still need a real idea. But once you have a few real ideas to choose from, picking the one you actually like working on matters more than I think people give it credit for.

After over a year of hacking on side projects, I finally get why people say the best projects scratch your own itch. Anyone can build a directory site or a job board, but it takes passion to keep improving.