I carry a little notebook around with me everywhere I go. I keep this notebook so that I can jot down the ideas for random businesses which pop into my mind. I’ve had plenty of them, and some of them I have pursued with mixed results. When you are considering venturing off, there’s a two part question you have to ask yourself when deciding to get up off the couch and start your next thing which will drive whether you are searching for happy face or sad face emoticon in your email to your buddies.

First, “do you have any relevant experience?” If the answer to that question is “no,” that’s fine. It’s more than fine actually, as many a successful business has been started by someone who was in way over their head. You need to understand that your lack of domain knowledge will necessarily create some hurdles for you to clear, and some of the hurdles universal to all new businesses will get a little bit higher. However, there have been plenty of people who learn on the job en route to building a very successful business. How you ask? Well, that’s the second question.

What is it that can counteract the bludgeon of ignorance? It’s a really important question, and it must have a “yes” answer if your answer to the first question was “no.” “Are you really passionate about whatever this thing is that you want to go do?” You must have a “yes” answer to this one if your answer to the last question was “no.” Without that passion, the hurdles that are going to be in your way are going to seem pretty impassable. It’s that passion for what you do that is going to get you through the hard times, and believe me there will be plenty of hard times.

So what about the other two possible answers? If you have relevant domain knowledge and are passionate about this project, then you are in the best position of all. You are going to clear over many of the early hurdles, and probably have many of the necessary contacts and rhythms to get yourself started. Further, as your business evolves, the likelihood that you run into blind spots is greatly reduced on account of your domain knowledge. Consider yourself in an enviable spot.

If you said you had relevant domain knowledge, but that you couldn’t be passionate about the project, I actually think this is worse than having said “no” to both. How could that be? You’re bringing domain knowledge to the business, so that has to count for something right? Sure, if you care about the problem. If you don’t care about the problem, why on Earth would you sign up for all of the stress of doing this as your own gig? Running or starting a company isn’t all about fun and games, and as we’ll talk about later you will come to understand that there are a great many things that you simply don’t care to do but have to do. Quickbooks anyone? The stories I could tell about my absolute hate and distaste for having to ever deal with Quickbooks are legend.

You see, if you have the domain knowledge it’s probably because you are already working in the field. You have some security associated with that in that you are pulling down a paycheck, have benefits, and can count yourself pretty lucky to have a job. Jumping to something new brings many new risks. When you are ultimately the last line of defense between success and fail, it’s a tough thing to take on if you really and truly don’t have a deep passion for it. You are essentially signing up for your old job, without the security and without the benefits. What fun is there in that? You are basically setting yourself up for failure.

In true business school form, let’s construct a 2×2 matrix to analyze the problem. Along one axis is the “do you have passion” question, and along the other is the “do you have relevant knowledge” question. I’m always happy to put the $50K plus that I spent on my MBA to work to boil down long winded discussions to a really simple 2×2 matrix. Want to hear something funny? There’s an MBA or MBA-candidate reading this right now trying to optimize this matrix. That just makes me laugh to think about.

The genesis for the project came about when my wife was pregnant with our first child. I was surprised at the state of the children’s DVD market. First, some of the titles were/are just terrible. Second, they are expensive given the amount of content you typically get with a DVD. Third, there wasn’t anything terribly innovative going on with the products. I’m a tech nerd, and thought I could do better, so I set about investigating my idea.

The basic premise was to create a series of DVDs that had stories on them, “animated,” and with dual audio voice over (one female “grandmother” and one male “grandfather” voice). Each DVD would have three stories, and a parent could choose which audio track they wanted to hear. The real interesting idea I had for the DVD was that through the use of some tricks in DVD authoring, each story would be made up of chapters, and each chapter represented one page of the story. The chapters would play in the right order, but each chapter actually had three different versions of itself. After the text of the page was read, there would be question asked about something happening on the page. Each of the three versions had a different question. This is akin to how you would read a story to a child. With the randomness element mixed into the ordering of which version of the page played, a parent could get multiple playback value out of the DVD, and would likely never hear the same order. I thought this was huge. Ask any parent how many Dora or Thomas DVDs they can recite from memory, and hate themselves for it.

My wife and I both thought that this sounded like a great idea. I secured the rights to some stories, prototyped the product, fixed some issues, had professional illustrators (hired via eLance) work on contract to bring the stories to life, and had the stories mapped to the DVD. I even provided the voice over work for the first version to save on costs. I pushed this all the way through to the manufacturing of many boxes full of DVDs.

What happened? I didn’t have passion for the project. I got caught up in some other things, and selling kids DVDs is actually pretty hard, especially when you aren’t 100% focused on it. If you want to get on the shelves of the stores, you need to go through a distributor. When you sell retail, there are margin issues. Oh, and retail also has “returns” issues. These were the sorts of things about which I didn’t know anything, and actually didn’t want to know anything about.

Unfortunately for me, I come from a software background, where you sell bits (not atoms).  Bits have zero marginal cost of production, and getting distribution is easy. My passion waned, and I ultimately ended up with a bunch of boxes in my garage. The obstacles that were placed in front of me became impassable. Had I been honest with myself from the beginning, I would have realized I was in the “probably screwed” box, and would have saved myself a ton of trouble and money.

As a side note, if you have a child between the ages of 2 and 5 and are looking for some interesting, limited edition DVDs, please drop me a note.

The moral? It’s OK if you don’t have domain knowledge for your project, so long as you have passion for it. If you are going to get outside of your comfort zone, you have to have that passion or the roadblocks will become impassable and you will fail. Having no domain knowledge and no passion is a terrible spot, because you are placing an order for “risk” topped with “I don’t give a shit.” That’s a recipe for fail. If you do have domain knowledge, and you are passionate about the project, you are in the best position of all.