Passion or business savvy, what's more important?

I think that's a good subject to expand. IMO, the "passion" thing is really relevant when it comes to blogs. Forums too, if the forum is in its infancy. The passion helps sustain you with a blog because you need something to keep you writing new and original articles for your site day in and day out. Same with a new forum, if you don't get excited about someone joining your forum and asking questions about the topic, you better have someone in there doing it for you or the forum isn't getting off the ground. Passion plus expertise is a real competitive advantage when it comes to blogs especially, and forums if you don't have it yourself you need to get someone else with it. Ok, you could hire a blogger with both passion and expertise, but good luck finding someone like that and good luck affording what they'll cost.

On the other hand, you don't really have to be passionate about the product you're selling on an ecommerce site. I like to use the word "understand" more than "passion" because I think you really need to understand what you're selling. I think ecommerce sites are more mechanical than blogs. While churning out blog posts may seem mechanical at times, that's the whole point of needing the passion to carry you through. With an ecommerce site, you're going to be doing mundane tasks like processing orders, which could be mostly accounting if you're dropshipping or manual if you're packaging the products yourself. Nobody has a passion for processing orders. Consistency is what you need here, not passion. Understanding the product is going to help you market it far better than passion.

Hobby sites can, and do, turn into businesses. In fact, when I'm buying forums I really love to find one that was started by a hobbyist who for whatever reason needs to move on. Often the hobbyist is facing the choice of closing down the site because they can't afford the hosting anymore and they don't have the expertise to properly monetize a forum (though Adsense has been a great help to many hobbyist site owners). And, that happens just at the point in time when the site starts to get serious traffic (the hosting company is banging at the door telling them to upgrade to a dedicated server). It takes some specialized experience to do it well, and that's where I enjoy being, but still I don't buy forums even if they were started by hobbyists and have a great community, unless I understand the product/industry/marketplace/etc...

Anyway, Clinton, if you want to spin that off to a new topic that's fine, it's an interesting topic of consideration. We regularly have people receiving the advice of going with your passion, but you're absolutely correct that it's not a necessity in business to have passion. Understanding, maybe, we can make a good argument for that, but passion, not always.