When Zach started Good-tutorials.com — because he couldn’t find a good photoshop-tutorials resource for his school project — he didn’t know what success he was gearing up for.

Today, Good-tutorials.com is perhaps the largest and most popular site about photoshop tutorials. Anyone who has ever had his or her tutorial featured on Zach’s site will tell you how much traffic he can send to you!

I was really glad when Zach accepted to answer my 5 Question Mini-Interview. Just for the record, he replied on Oct 29. Here are his responses –

I’m a 21 year old student majoring in Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. My main website, Good-Tutorials.com, has been around for about four and a half years now. It’s the largest tutorial listing for Adobe Photoshop online- we just passed 12,000 tutorials today, in fact.

I try not to do too much with it other than save it, for the most part. My costs are relatively low (most of it is just human costs- the time spent per day updating the site, replying to emails, etc), though I do have a couple dedicated servers.

I think a big failing point is having a cohesive vision for whichever project you have. Some people have some decent ideas that might possibly make some money, but they can’t identify what the user really wants and they fail in that regard- they can’t build a system that meshes with their idea.

On the other hand, some people have the potential to make a solid product, but they have a hard time with coming up with a stellar idea that they can profit from.

It’s a bit of a balancing act, but having a cohesive vision that you apply to all areas (from generating the idea to implementing the idea) will really help you become successful down the line.

Enjoy what you’re doing, take pride in what you’re doing. If you can’t fully jump into a project, new business idea, or anything like that, then personally I don’t think it’s worth it. Life is too short to do things you don’t love.

If you want to get more down-to-earth and practical in regards to that point: if you don’t love what you’re doing, it will show through in your work. People can see that, and in the long term they’ll stop using your product, they won’t promote it as much, and so on. Love what you do; it’ll show.

I have a couple ideas bouncing around my head that I’d like to start work on sometime soon. I also want to get started on the newest version of Good-Tutorials. There’s always that next project, that next iteration to do.

Thanks Zach! Zach’s site is Good-Tutorials.com and he has a blog too!

Next in the series is Guy Kawasaki — the legendary VC, author and blogger par-excellence. Read more about him at guykawasaki.com.