52Frames is an online photography community that started as founder Yosef Adest's passion project, which grew into a successful business with over 3,000 photo submissions weekly and 700 paying members after ten years of incremental growth and centred around community building, organic word of mouth, and delivering value to customers.

Rebecca Ringquist turned a side project of hand-drawn embroidery samplers into a full-time job, grossing over $15K a month with her business Dropcloth Samplers, which she launched accidentally after selling a few samplers at an end of session craft sale that prominent bloggers bought and posted about.

Tookapic is a premium photo journaling platform and community that encourages amateur photographers to share one photo a day for a year, and with ~$2000/mo in subscriptions and an additional $100-200/mo from selling photo books and prints, it attracts entrepreneurs, accountants, programmers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other non-photographers.