What part-time jobs should be suitable for founders to have in other to fund their expenses and work on their startup for the rest of their time? I wanna hear personal stories too!
Since then I have noticed others doing the same type of work to support themselves while their businesses are in the early stages (be it startup or trad. business).
Im relatively old and have a family withs kids in school, for me the hardest part of founding a startup was the financial strain. We extended way past our initial runway by not taking salaries, eroded our savings. It was difficult, but I had confidence in the business, we had responsibility to our customers* and this gig saw me through the really dark times.
We are a success case (our startup is seeing a lot of traction and funding now isnt an issue), but this is an area that I think needs more attention. I can imagine there were potentially great businesses that failed because of this. Startups (esp B2B ones) take time to find their feet. Older founders can eat ramen but you cant feed it to your kids.
PS On general advice id tend towards activities that arent too strenuous and are different to your main tasks within the startup. Eg developing part time while coding full time for your startup id imagine would be a huge drain.
* Our startup has an impact aspect. You couldn't with a heart abandon it, even if you were to roll back your services in a professional manor.
My experience with MemSQL has been awesome on every possible level, before, during, and after.
I found the job via regular application process + interview, they were searching explicitly for part-time, so I'd recommend looking for that. I strongly recommend no conflict of interests of any sort, I was doing QA at MemSQL, they knew about my startup where I was doing content recommendation/machine learning/backend+web.
Aside from money, it's been great to work with another startup that: 1) was a US company (vs we were all Italian founders), 2) was in a more advanced stage (so, potential to learn about processes), 3) was and is full of great talented employees (so, great connections that we're still keeping alive).
One memorable placement was in the shipping department of company which sold tooth whitening kits to dentists. Another was as an office manager at a cremation company sales office.
I actually enjoyed temping for the most part since I was able to build various skills I didn’t have before and try out different roles in companies.
Was there sort of a pivotal moment where you felt OfficeSnapshots was going to be viable? Did it happen organically or did you have to push hard for it?
When I started it there was no intention of it being a business and it took a while to even think about it that way.
The other, typical option is to consult for a not very demanding customer.