Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Creativity Is About Passion, Not Paychecks
[Via Techdirt]

There are many who argue, despite historical and ongoing evidence to the contrary, that creativity will die out if creators cannot be guaranteed some sort of livable wage. It’s almost as if any creator who creates as a hobby or potential second job either a) is being shortchanged by disruption, piracy, etc., or b) shouldn’t be taken seriously because they haven’t abandoned their day job.

It’s an odd assertion. Most groundbreaking creative efforts were conceived and carried out while the creators worked in a variety of other non-creative jobs. It was only after these breakthroughs that these artists went on to live solely on the earnings of their creative works. Somehow, we’re now expected to believe that without piracy and other disruptions, creators would be making better, livable wages, possibly right out of the gate.

That whole thought process ignores the reality. Not having a paycheck tied to your creative endeavors means being able to fail more often and experiment more freely, without having to worry about hurting your current source of income. Case in point: three developers who solved a problem most companies didn’t know they had, all without having to “give up the day job.”

For the past two years, Brandon Medenwald, Justin Kalvoda, and Bill Burgess have held down full-time jobs while also launching their company, Simply Made Apps.

Their only product is an app called Simple In/Out, which solves a problem that drove Brandon crazy. He explains, “In my fulltime job as a web programmer, we had an old magnetic in/out board like they use in sales offices to keep track of who is in the office and who isn’t. Five or six years ago, they transitioned to a Web-based version.

“I was constantly frustrated with it, because some of the roughly 40 people in our firm wouldn’t use it. The board became extremely out of date. For years, I was joking that I could write a better piece of software in a weekend, but then over beers in a bar with two friends, it dawned on me we could solve this problem by using the GPS chips in cell phones.”

[More]

Read the whole article as it demonstrates how the app economy allows passionate people to create new products in a weekend for a few hundred dollars.

That few hundred dollars can rapidly expand to thousands or more. All without having to quit a day job.

Low barriers ti entry, rapid bootstrapping and exponential economies all merge to disrupt the very act of creating a business.