I know people who try to work part-time. But part-time does not == 50%. From what I've seen, it looks more like 25%. Those part time jobs have a way of encroaching more and more into your life. PG has wise words on one of his essays about this.
Working full time on an idea, gives a great sense of fulfillment and you can make great progress on a day to day basis. The downside is that it's easy to fall into a vacuum where you're isolated from the world. If you take a day off and slack, there's no one who's going to fire you. The downside of that is that you really have to manage your time yourself and be good about it.
If you have experience managing yourself to a daily schedule and also managing yourself to a roadmap/sprint/plan then you can do well.
In terms of bills, really most people have more money than they think. At least that's my opinion. I think the average person who saves some and has worked for a few years has some money saved up. If you haven't been working for long then you're probably used to living on a shoestring budget. If you can deny yourself all the things you don't really need in life, your money will go a long way.
Lastly, get out! Don't just work from home all the time. Work from a cafe or the library. Meet up with friends.. esp any who may be in the same situation as you. Get out. Exercise. Take breaks!
Oh another last thing. Doing your company really takes much longer than you anticipate. It's a marathon, not a sprint. So make sure you take care of yourself in the process. It's too easy to become a workaholic and let everything else (health, relationships) go to waste.
You also need to be able to pay the bills, so save up or raise some money. Friends and family money is good here, because raising from professional investors is usually a full-time job in itself. Or you can consult at a high rate and use the margin to fund a startup. We did this for a few years, which was fine - it was our only option, really - but full-time work is so much better.
The good news: you'll be more motivated, since you see the dwindling bank account balance. You know that you need to move things along quickly so you can pay the bills.
Everyone close to me, including my co-founder, keeps telling me to stay fulltime until I have a replacement income from GridSpy. It sounds like there is contradiction on this from the HN crowd.
On the other hand, if you have responsibility to children, a partner, a mortgage payment etc then yeah, you need to know you won't let those things fall apart.
I personally am used to living off a small income because I've been going to school for the past many years. If I was used to $80k a year in earnings, it would take alot more to make the plunge to full-time.
When you are working any type of demanding full-time job, you are asked to problem solve, innovate, and provide meaningful contributions. Simply put, the more thought and inspiration you put into your full-time job, the less you have for your baby, your startup. That's not to say you have NONE, it just means you have less. Less energy, less brainpower, less time, just less.
Odd jobs, on the other hand, work more like a release for your brain. For Bill, tutoring math was easy, fun, and fulfilling. It re-filled his inspiration, rather than drained it.
Way to go Bill, and thanks for this post. jv
Wasn't too worried about paying the bills as I was living in my parents' basement. However, the drawback of that is the same as having too much money--doesn't make you anxious enough to figure out how to get to ramen profitability.
It wasn't too hard to stay on track if you're use to seeing things to the end, or if you're into what you do, or you believe in it. What's difficult is deciding when to quit. Do you have little users because your product sucks? Or because you don't know where to find them? If not, how do you? Is there something here, but you're not doing it right, or is there really not anything there?
Having been through that as a single founder for a little less than two years was a lonely at times, but you just get use to it after a while. If anything, it's toughened me up a little.
Overall, I think quitting your job isn't quite as scary as one may think, especially if you use your time to learn and grow. Chances are, you'll learn a lot (what, people never say, but it's one of those experience things), and you won't end up in the gutter. If I've discovered anything, it's that the world is a bigger place than you can imagine. People do all sorts of things to make money, and you find opportunities and opportunities find you as long as you do something of meaning to yourself, can teach others, and can build something and get it out there for others to use.
If I had a regret these last four years, it's that I didn't learn faster, and that I didn't quit sooner. That said, don't quit willy-nilly. Have a plan and have goals. Those plans and goals might change, but as long as you know what you're going to be learning out of the experience, that's what counts.
We didn't last long, about a year, (long story) but next time I will make sure to have more savings in the bank and a clearer path to revenue, funding, or both. It's good to be hungry but too much of it is a distraction.
Doing it marked me, I think. I'm less patient with slow release cycles, timidity, and red tape.
Without my wife and my cofounder Romain, who are both much crazier than I am, I'd never have done it.
I'm really enjoying my work. I have two part-time co-founders, who have quite busy jobs. So, sometimes things get hard to do on my own, but it was never going to be easy.
It is very satisfying to work on something that I really care about and want to build into something great over time. One thing I love about my new work life is the time I can take to pause and think through things. It's nice to just lighten things up sometimes, not take myself too seriously and just feel happy that I'm doing what I love in a city I love (London) with so much freedom.
Getting up in the morning has never been so easy and going to bed never so hard!
If there was a single founder instead of our team of three, we'd be at ramen profitability - a hazard of a larger bootstrapping team, however, it has huge benefits in ability to actually produce something.
I'm a big believer in it, for similar reasons to the article. If the idea's so great, you should quit and do it all the time. It's not as if there's ever a lack of work.