There are a couple traps we fall into. As curious individuals gravitating towards challenges and complexity, it is rather easy to make an industry or problem interesting. Almost too easy, and this effect leads us down some rabbit holes. Since when was Ad tech or consumer social your passion? Do you actually care about some super niche problem your b2b saas tool solves?

This innate curiosity and ability to make almost any problem interesting is a double-edged sword. Sometimes it leads us deep into verticals we do sincerely care about or end up finding incredibly fulfilling. But often you end up putting time into a project that at some point you realize you don’t care too much about. Such projects can be exciting and incredibly fulfilling but your motivation and enthusiasm are overly dependent on extrinsic factors.

Such has been my experience this summer working on b2b saas tools for ecommerce merchants. I’ve come to realize I don’t really care about ecommerce and improving site conversion rates. While there are still high highs when we onboard a customer or launch a feature, the lows are even lower. At those lowest moments, there is less passion to fuel internal motivation. I’m pursuing a project purely for the thrill of building, not some higher order mission.

And maybe such an experience is ok. While I’m not spending the next 10 years of my life in ecommerce, building in the space is a great exercise, and the skillsets I possess align themselves quite well to shipping b2b saas webapps. But how do you balance what you care about with what the market rewards and aligns with your skills?

Indoor farming and carbon capture are industries that seem to capture my imagination, but as a full-time student with purely a software background, I’m ill suited to make meaningful progress in these verticals at the moment. These domains tend to require well funded hardware teams building physical infrastructure. Meanwhile, my experience mining data and shipping webapps makes me a good match for ecommerce saas tools. Furthermore, the inexpensive lightweight nature of building a web app fits my student lifestyle quite well. Thus lies my dilemma.

My current thinking goes as follows. As a college student early on in my entrepreneurial journey I should optimize for learning. This learning can take many forms: shipping code, acquiring customers, building a team, scaling a product etc… What’s notable is the more success you have in your project the more higher order skills you seem to learn. If I’m able to build a product worth scaling, I get to learn how to hire people and lead a team. Inversely, if my project is stuck in idea stage, I never learn how to ship production code or work with users.

Thus, industries that move quickly with low levels of regulation and corporate bureaucracy seem particularly appealing. There are no yearlong sales cycles or regulatory approvals. Launching a product to active users and iterating takes a much shorter timeframe: more learning can be done.

The ultimate manifestation of short iteration cycles is consumer tech. Instagram is constantly testing new variants. But this is where my thinking breaks down. In my opinion, most people’s time is better spent than building consumer social apps. But why?

I think the optimum lies in building a project in a quick moving industry but with highly transferable skillsets being learned. Learning how to onboard and work with a business is more useful than how to market a consumer social app, given that a majority of startups are business facing.

Along these lines, if you can’t decide on an industry you truly love, try to find models or playbooks your excited about. For instance, I’m super excited about ML optimized closed loop systems. I’m currently working on such a tool in e-commerce, but the paradigm can be applied in a myriad of industries including indoor farming—a closed system with inputs optimized. By transferring playbooks from quick moving industries that make great playgrounds, to slower yet more meaningful industries, you can hone your skillset faster. And as you succeed quicker in these faster industries, you begin to learn higher order skills that are more transferable (i.e. you go from mindlessly coding a frontend to managing a team).

Thus, I would say, pursue a quick moving industry, hone your skillset, see what you like and dislike about the vertical, and advance accordingly. Or if you’re one of the lucky ones and already have a deep love for a vertical, go for that though these principles still apply within that vertical. ∎