A hobby “career?” - where might the puck be going?

[steve B]

A lot of what might matter is more related to you than the hobby.
Strengths, weaknesses, where your knowledge is, how you work, age, ability/interest in relocating. All that should got into it.

I gave things a low risk try with general collectibles a few years ago, and learned a few things.

I'm pretty good at buying, not so good at selling.
A lot of that was not being organized and efficient. If I hit 20-25 items a week on Ebay I started messing up in small ways. Not really a big problem at the time, but stuff like getting into packing and forgetting to reply to an email, or having a bunch of stuff scanned and not listing it.

I also found out I was not really into taking risks past a certain dollar amount.
I was pretty good at buying something for $5 and selling it for 10-15. Or a lot of stuff for 50 and making 10 individual lots that were 10-15. But I rarely took the chance on more expensive things I wasn't sure of. Long term, it's great to double your money, but doubling $10 still only gets you $10 profit.

Neither of those things was really entirely supportable. If My wife didn't work in the computer industry it wouldn't have worked at all.