Business Development · Engineering
I am an engineering student and a freelance photographer. I want to start my journey through entrepreneurship but I don't know where to start from. I don't know whether I should focus on photography and find a new aspect of this domain that can generate money or find something in my field of education, engineering, in order to earn money ?
In entrepreneurship no skill is useless. Photography will help to inculcate a sense of design in your mind while engineering will help you to put your creative solution into a real life product. If you can do both and learn how to program full stack (from visual design to backend) you'd be immensely useful!!
I am a professional photographer over 30 years of experience I would advise you to finish for an engineer and for the first attempt to sell photos on some of the stock sites, if you are selling, you can continue to sell photos and study. In any case, the stock can help you see how many people are interested in your work.
Focus on your passion and money will follow you, focus on money and passion will be lost.
Hi Mohammed,
I come from the area of business development in Hi-tech fields. Both areas you state are quite broad. To help you narrow it down you should first think where your passion is? That is the first and most important question.
Very generally speaking, Engineering is an area with higher barriers to entry (such as a longer degree, which you are pursuing) and the time it will take you to create a product and get money for it (time to market) will probably be longer than with photography.
With photography (in my eyes), you will need to start looking for clients given you have some basic equipment. That already is a shorter time to income. First clients can be acquired and you can then slowly build up through the revenue generated.
I will be happy to help more over email.
Nadav.
What type of engineering? I'm a software engineer who also does photography semi-professionally (I'll sell my shots when opportunities come up, but I don't organize a business around it).
Software Engineering (probably "real" engineering trades too) is typically much more lucrative, there's no way around it. As a photographer, you need to work for every scrap, while the world can't throw enough at you if you've got the right kind of STEM skills.
But why not combine both passions? One app idea that's been bouncing around in my head recently is something that will automatically tag and categorize your photo library on the desktop, like a Bridge plugin, using deep learning models. I don't think the market is big enough to build a business around that, but it might get you thinking about ways to combine both domains.
Hi, Mohammed Somai
Its great to see your are interested in photography and it will also lead to great entrepreneurship ways.
You can try to make the hub of your photos online and narrow the categories of your photos and start a communty of making other photogrpahers to upload in the same.
You can even sell the photos or you can make it Creative Commons copyright.
Decide what it is that you enjoy doing and then find a way to earn a good living out of it. -Napoleon Hill
I will advise you to go into engineering instead of photography because photography is phasing out due to the fact that gsm phones now comes with cameras that has high mega pix, so people hardly engage the services of photographers
Well which one are you really good at? Which one of them can keep you engaged for a long time? That should be your first guiding factor and then comes other aspects. Practically its impossible to say where you can earn money. It all finally boils down to skills and interests.