Hey y’all — are you following your passion?

For some founders, building a startup is opportunistic. They look for the biggest problem and try to go solve it.

For others, they look for a problem they already understand because they’ve lived it.

Chris, Lindsay, and Michael Lenard of Horse Spot fit the second category for a T.

They’re taking a larger-than-you’d-think niche (and insular) market that’s running on 20+ year old software, and modernizing it.

But why they’re succeeding is because, even in a market that’s skeptical of change, they fit right in and can build trust quickly. They understand the problem at a level outsiders would not.

This is a story about why, sometimes, it’s a good idea to build in areas you’re passionate about:

There are perks to being an insider.

All of them allow you to move faster, and generally be preferred by your customers over competitors.

Here are four advantages Horse Spot has had that can easily apply to other verticals as well:

Perhaps the most obvious benefit is that you can often build with confidence.

You should always do user research and talk to customers, but when you’ve lived the problem in the past you can afford to make some assumptions (because your assumptions are based on real knowledge and will legitimately be better and higher accuracy than they otherwise would).

In Horse Spot’s case, industry knowledge let them entirely bypass most of the early requirements gathering before they started building the product.

They’d already spent years doing that without realizing it.

Communities are based around shared culture, norms, etc.

It’s those little nuances that let you build faster. You implicitly know things that outsiders will literally take months, or in some cases years, to realize.

Horse Spot understood from day 1 how other insiders would react to certain features, pricing structures, and the right long term vision.

This is the type of advantage that even a more well-funded competitor wouldn’t be able to compete with quickly.

It’s way easier to sell to people you already know and who already trust you, or who you’ve been introduced to by a mutually trusted intermediary.

There’s no substitute for direct relationships and the warm intros they bring as well.

But it’s not just sales. Relationships mean faster feedback loops, and an ear to the ground on how the market’s preferences shift over time.

It can let you plan for what’s coming rather than just being reactive.

Particularly in tight-knit, insular, community-based industries like the horse show world, the best way to build trust quickly is to be able to show clearly that you genuinely understand and love the industry you’re building for.

And there’s no real way to fake this.

Horse Spot spent years working at and riding in horse shows, and even went back to work in show offices again when they first decided to build the company.

Those are more than compelling talking points when they go to sell, now. It’s a longterm demonstration of their interest in the space that makes others, who have that similar lifelong interest, feel like they can trust the product.

Advertise in my newsletter to get in front of 70,000+ founders.