Yep, the main purpose of a business is to make money. That's what it boils down to. It's nice to be passionate and to improve the craft and whatnot, but those things are completely separated from the main aspect of any business - making money.
What you need is to have a great product. But this word - 'great' is very complicated, because it can mean a million different things. Everyone's definition is different. It varies a lot. You can't sell a cheap basic NY slice at a swanky restaurant in the best part of town where people show up in sportscars, cause it'd be completely mismatched, and inversely you can't sell an expensive hand-made neapolitan traditional *insert your favorite buzzwords here* pizza in a poorer area or downtown where people want a cheap, fast slice. In both cases you'd have no sales and would go bust very quickly.
Tailoring your product to your target audience is something that's almost impossible when starting out, it's down to trial and error, you CAN make some observations of course but it's still a gamble.
Be wary of people who SAY they would buy something. Ask them to actually buy it, to reach into their pocket and buy your product right now, if they like it so much. See if they keep doing that again and again, week after week, month after month. That's the true test, when they give you their dollars, otherwise some might just be polite or trying to be friendly but longterm nobodys gonna be polite enough to keep buying a product they dont REALLY like.
Being passionate about pizza is one thing, and it's fun, it's great, but building a pizza business is a totally different thing altogether. It's not something you do for fun, it's something you do for profit. You can put your own twist into it, focusing on good customer service, good marketing, whatever, but at the end of the day if people dont like it, you'll fail.
And it's not really about quality, which is another very subjective term, even if you hit the nail on the head, it's about consistency. It's a capital sin of any business to have the product vary in any way or form. If you buy a pizza today and it's some way, then the next day you buy it again and it's different, that sometimes makes people so mad it's like a betrayal, you have to have your production procedure so well thought out, down to the last degree of temp or second of mixing and proofing.
This is why mcdonalds is the best burger place in the world and dominos makes the best pizza - objectively. The taste of their food isnt THAT bad, and they deliver the exact same product every time - a feat which is hard for someone to do in his own kitchen, let alone a corporation in tens of thousands of restaurants across the world. I know everyone tends to say their food is bad, but if you go past what people say, and look at what the majority of people do with their money - the vote with the dollar as it were - the businesess stay afloat and keep expanding all over, while small shops go bust all the time. That's never a coincidence!
In the end it is a leap of faith of some sorts, you'll never have the market analysis, the product engineering and marketing budget these big corporation have, so you gotta wing it, do some tests as much as you can and then start slow, with a simple menu. If you happen to have a good product for your market then you can start building a business around it - but it's just plain hard work, and money has to be your goal, not so much passion or fun. Those can come into the equation sometimes but dont count on it, it's not guaranteed
As a personal note, i think the whole passion thing is just hogwash people say in interviews to sound nice. Nobody's gonna say they made it because they're smarter than everybody else or because they got lucky. So they all go for the 'passion' argument. In my opinion it goes the other way, find something that first makes you a lot of money, then i think you will become passionate about it, not the other way around. If i had a hundred million in the bank courtesy of my business i'm pretty sure i'd be pretty damn passionate about it!!
