How I built a hobby discovery engine: 180 hobbies, 10K quiz completions, 7 months in

Seven months ago I got frustrated watching people, including myself, burn money on hobbies that never stuck. A guitar that collects dust. A camera that never leaves the bag. It's not a discipline problem, it's a fit problem.

The right hobby exists at the intersection of three things: your lifestyle, your personality, and your genuine interests. When all three overlap, it stops feeling like effort.

So I built HobbyStack. A database of 180+ hobbies, each scored across 10 lifestyle dimensions including cost, social level, physical intensity, and skill ceiling. A 3 minute quiz runs your answers against every hobby and returns a ranked list with reasoning behind each match.

No personality types. No vague suggestions. Just data.

Seven months in, 10,674 people have taken the quiz and we're at around 150 daily users. The matching is still being refined, getting the scoring right is an ongoing process and honestly the hardest part of the whole thing. The long term vision is bigger though: a catalog of every genuinely interesting niche thing a person could dedicate time to, properly mapped to the people most naturally wired for it.

Still a lot to build. But the problem is real and the numbers suggest people are hungry for a better answer than just googling "hobbies to try."