What a Failed Startup Taught Me About Passion
By Ryan Tyrrell
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE — People love to say, “Follow your passion.”
It sounds right. It sounds bold. It sounds like the kind of advice successful people are supposed to give. But I’ve learned that it’s also incomplete.
A few years ago, after building and selling a business in the car wash industry, I put time, capital, and energy into a sports-focused startup called Rabble. On paper, it made perfect sense. I’ve always loved sports. I grew up around team sports. I’ve played, coached, and spent a lot of time around the kind of community that sports can create.
So, I assumed sports was the passion, and that a sports startup was the obvious next move.
Swing and a miss.
It didn’t work, and I wasn’t happy. That doesn’t mean the idea was stupid. It just means passion alone doesn’t suffice. I had failed to ask the next question.
At the time, there were real market headwinds for a business like Rabble. Social and live video were becoming a giant-platform game. Facebook opened Live to all U.S. iPhone users in 2016, which accelerated the competitive pressure in real-time broadcasting, and Periscope — one of the defining products of that era — ultimately shut down after declining engagement and an unsustainable cost structure. This was not an easy environment for a smaller startup trying to build a durable niche in live sports media.
That matters, because founders are often too quick to turn every failed business into a morality play about personal flaws. In our case, the market was saying that software is capital-intensive, distribution matters, platform risk is real, and it’s hard to win against companies with much bigger audiences and resources.
But the deeper lesson for me had less to do with the market and more to do with fit.
The truth is that I didn’t love software. I didn’t love living inside a product roadmap. I didn’t love the daily rhythm of building an app in a crowded space. What I loved about sports was something else.
I loved the human part.
I loved the shared experience. I loved what happens when people are in the same place, trying to accomplish something together. I loved the team dynamic. I loved the face-to-face energy. I loved being part of something that felt real, physical, and immediate.
That was the miss.
A lot of entrepreneurs get tripped up in exactly that way. They say they’re passionate about sports, media, travel, technology, food or wellness. But the better question is, “What is it, exactly, about my passion that draws me in and fuels me for the long haul?”
For me, it turned out not to be “sports media.” It was connection, teamwork and the feeling of shared participation. It was creating environments where people feel more present, more engaged, and less isolated from one another.
Once I understood that, my decisions got better.
It changed the kinds of businesses I wanted to spend time on. It changed how I thought about hospitality. It changed how I thought about the outdoors. It changed how I defined success.
I became more interested in businesses that help people connect in person — especially in settings that make the outdoors feel less intimidating and more inviting. I’m drawn to experiences where the win condition is not that someone downloaded something, but that they showed up, relaxed, paid attention, had a real conversation, and left feeling better than when they arrived.
That is a much better fit for who I am.
One of the traps in entrepreneurship is confusing prestige with fit. Software can feel glamorous. Apps can feel scalable. Media can feel exciting. But some of the happiest and most effective operators I know are building businesses that are more tactile, more human, and more grounded in what customers experience day to day.
There’s nothing wrong with ambition. But I think a lot of us would make better decisions if we stopped asking only, “What am I passionate about?” and started asking, “What part of this actually gives me energy?”
That question has saved me from repeating the same mistake.
I don’t look back on Rabble as wasted time. I look at it as expensive clarity. It taught me that being adjacent to something you love is not the same as building in the part of it that fits you best. It taught me to separate identity from category. And it reminded me that passion is not a slogan. It’s a clue — but only if you keep digging.
If I could rewrite the cliché, I’d put it this way: Don’t just follow your passion. Define it precisely enough to build your life around the right part of it.
— Ryan Tyrrell is a Nashville-based entrepreneur and operator with experience building businesses in consumer services, hospitality, digital products and community-focused ventures. Connect with Ryan Tyrrell on LinkedIn.
Further reading:
· “Facebook Takes On Periscope By Giving Live Streaming To All U.S. iPhoners” (TechCrunch)
· “Farewell, Periscope” (Medium)
· “Twitter shuts down live-streaming app Periscope” (Axios)