I Quit My Job. Here’s How I Planned the Start as an Entrepreneur | Hacker News Reader

I Quit My Job. Here’s How I Planned the Start as an Entrepreneur

medium.com

34 pointsmratiebatie41 comments

I would actually recommend not quitting your job to be an entrepreneur. I did it, and as the money ran out I couldn't even focus anymore and made poor decisions. It seriously affected my self esteem as a man. It might be different if you're single and young and can get your expenses really low. But I am married and was supporting my wife in her education.

I strongly advise getting a part time job and bootstrapping in peace knowing you have the bills covered. The change of pace switching between tasks is not unwelcome, and I feel like I can make better decisions without a gun to my head. I don't feel like I'm losing any productivity.

I also have the resources to hire someone to do e.g. Some of the front-end development that I'm not that good at anyway, if I chose to.

I concur. It’s so stressful when the clock starts ticking: suddenly you are racing against time, which may cause a certain kind of desperation, which makes you make poor choices.

Most of the things the poster is doing, like figuring out “what type of business do I want to start?”, are absolutely things you must find out before you quit your job.

I would even go further and say that one should already validate the business idea before quitting. Once you figure out what you want, you can perhaps start slowly scaling down work (I know working 4 days a week is very common in .nl) and use the extra day to validate the business.

All in all, I’d say that following the advice mentioned in the article is not good for starting entrepreneurs.

So he's spent a month of his six-month runway, and what he's accomplished so far is writing a journal and rating a bunch of fields of business on how much he might theoretically enjoy starting a company in one of them.

Starting a business is about getting things done. Thinking about what things you might possibly want to get done in the future, or making charts about things that you aren't getting done is a pleasant way to avoid getting things done, but it doesn't really get you any closer to your goal.

This is almost comedic at the complete lack of self-awareness. Once it got the to happiness rating of e-commerce and starting a podcast, I half expected the next paragraph to be an MLM pitch.

This isn’t advice, this is marketing. Dudes been in the workforce for a year and intended to spend half of this time travelling and has now quit.

I wish him all the best but this isn’t the way to do it if you really want to make it on your own.

I ran a company for nearly a decade straight out of uni and can tell you it’s horrendous to have no income and no fall back, I got through it with a lot of luck and making some some funding decisions that ultimately killed the business.

Start small, grow on the side, build something stable and then go full time - or raise a boat load of VC and hope for the best.

I really like Derek Sivers "Change Careers Like Tarzan" model https://sive.rs/tarzan

"I get emails from many people who want to make a big change in their career.

Each one wants to quit their current career, and boldly leap into their new venture or preferred lifestyle.

When they ask my advice, they think I’m going to say, “Yes! Quit! Go for it!”

But instead, they’re surprised at my suggestion:

Remember how Tarzan swings through the jungle? He doesn’t let go of the previous vine until the next vine is supporting his weight.

So my advice is: Change careers like Tarzan.

Don’t let go of the old one until the new one is supporting you.

And make sure you don’t lose momentum."

Sometimes the first vine breaks.

Its tough to take advice based on analogy to a fictional character.

Think of it as taking advice from a successful serial entrepreneur who is using a metaphor.

He quit his job at a consultancy to become a solo consultant. Groundbreaking.

Dutch government has lot of benefits and Grants for people who wish to create their own company. I would recommend applying for them in worst case scenario

WBSO and MIT come to mind. WBSO only works well if you already have some source of income, though, which can be from a part time job.

With economy going down the drain and nobody sees the end of the tunnel, I'm not sure, that leaving your job is the best decision, because as it was mention in the article:

"The worst thing that can happen is that I don’t earn any money in the next 6 months and I’ll have to find a job again."

Not sure how the job market will look in February, but pretty sure, not as nice as before Covid.

Says “only action leads to results” then lists out 9 different things you should plan out... lol

And don’t get me started on Tony Robbins

It’s almost impossible to start a business by yourself.

Your first 5 years of your career are vital because you’re making connections that you can leverage when starting a new venture.

But starting by yourself AND having almost no understanding of how the industry works. No chance. This type of move kills career trajectories.

If my business had failed in the first 4 years I’d have been toast. As it was killing the business after 8 years was still hard enough to build a new career from. Starting a business in your early 20s is fun, it can work out and you will learn a lot but if it tanks you’ll have been better off starting in a normal job 9 times out of 10

You'll probably want to validate the R in your ROI ratings with the people who will be using your product as quickly as possible instead of making educated guesses. There have been many times where my expectations of return were completely wrong.

If I understand the timeline:

- July 2019 - start first full time job

- early 2020 - 6 months unpaid leave

- June 2020 - quit job to start company

- August 2020 - blog post about how to quit your job

So someone with less than a year of full time experience who seemingly hasn't actually built a business is giving me advice on how to successfully quit my job? I guess that's the part they've succeeded at so far.

That’s hilarious, I was about to respond in some grumpy fashion about how it’s basically impossible for anyone to get any useful information or advice out of this article. I didn’t even notice this timeline.

Not even year into a career and the author already doesn’t like it.

I mean, it’s entirely possible that your first job just sucks. It’s entirely possible that your first company just sucks. I’d just look for a different job if it was me.

Dropping everything and becoming a particularly vague brand of entrepreneur isn’t going to work. A huge percentage of companies who have really serious complex business plans and even seed capital still fail. And here’s a junior-level person thinking they’re just going to start a successful business in a selection of vague categories (e.g. email marketing - I don’t know if the author has any clue how mature and complex this product segment really is. You can buy some fantastically complex email marketing software for like $20/month).

But I’m trying not to be grumpy. Good luck author. I’m guessing we’ll be seeing you in the cubicle in 6 months.

I'm 28 and virtually every single male I talk to in their 20s has this deep resentment of working for a corporation. It personally used to resonate with me, but it turns out I like money much more than freedom.

"You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for."

- Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)

Advice given to a main character who's (spoilers?) smart and thoughtful enough to be deeply bored by and unhappy with anything like a normal career, while also easily doing well at such a job while hardly trying, but who also believes deeply that he's meant for something more artistic and intellectual and adventurous but is both entirely unmotivated to actually make that happen, and also probably not that smart.

And yes I felt attacked when I read the book :-)

Entrepreneurship is far less free, too.

If you own a business, can you really just take two weeks off and ignore your customers?

Can you just clock out after 8 hours?

Can you get sick or go on maternity/paternity leave and just come back to work to a functioning business?

Salaried work is highly appealing. It really doesn’t have to feel like corporate slavery.

Right? It's very hard work being an entrepreneur and if you take time off and that results in your customers going unserviced, then you certainly will feel the consequence of "setting your own schedule".

If you have everything automated and your business is growing and customers are happy and loyal, well then you can take time off because by all indications you've put in a lot of hard work and intelligent design to achieve that.

For me, I actually enjoy the grunt work and the meetings and corporate BS in exchange for a quite stable paycheck and societal approval. It only leaves me with just enough free time for personal projects so that they can forever remain theoretical and unfinished and unfocused, as they deserve to be, because actual implementation into a robust and profitable platform is a quick way to kill personal interest in a subject ;)

How to become an entrepreneur (from someone who has actually done it):

  - Get income from other people via job
  - Learn
  - Come up with idea
  - Test market in 2 weeks for < $100
  - Rinse and repeat until market test gives positive results you can't ignore
  - Quit job
  - Release version 1 in 2 weeks
  - Have income by 4 week mark
  - If no income by 4 week mark, u fucked up, get a job

How high should the income be though? A few existing clients of mine were willing and did change to my platform, but how do you know if the business is scalable/will be competitive against other large businesses?

IMO, it should cover company and living expenses.

The rest can come later.

While helpful, I do believe these types of “rules” should not be followed as if they’re set in stone. Adapt them to your own situation.

In my case I had success with a fairly complex big data platform, there would be no way a version could be released in such short a time. This didn’t matter, as I followed a slightly different strategy.

A different way of looking at things is thinking about what can do wrong, and working back on trying to mitigate things. There’s a big, big difference in strategy you need to take if you need, say, a thousand paying clients in order to be “ramen profitable” vs one big client. I work in the latter space, and we managed to find a way for our first customer to partially fund the development of the platform, the money they would get back once the “monthly payments” would otherwise be arriving.

Totally different approach, but it’s one hell of a validation of an idea without taking on too much risk!

Well said. Yes of course those rules aren't set in stone but the idea is remove as much risk as possible, as cheaply as possible.

while this works for some businesses, there are plenty of startups that could not have been formed this way

Find me a FAANG company that didn't start out simply.

The trick is to shoot a lot of shots and double down on the ones that hit.

This question looked interesting, and it's a matter of opinion but IMO none of them started out nearly as simply as we're discussing in this thread. I think they all fail the 4-weeks-to-revenue test (Not seeking to argue, was just curious).

Facebook is probably the simplest: one month initial development time, launching after that month, adding three more colleges the month after. It looks like they had funding within about five months. Maybe worth noting they're the most software-only of the bunch, and that the v1 product was a CRUD app with great market fit (that's a good thing here for velocity, I'm not downplaying their success). And especially when they were founded, revenue wasn't really seen as necessary, so they probably get a pass on the "be profitable in 4 weeks" bit.

Amazon did start out sort of simply, as a bookstore, but it took a year from incorporation to launch and Bezos had a significant investment from parents. Remember luck and survivor bias, they caught the dotcom boom and bust, too.

Apple sort of fits simplicity - you had a couple people who worked together before identifying the potential of a product, founded a company, and get to prototypes and incorporation in a few months. On the other hand I think it's a tough case for simplicity since step 1 is "Invent the Apple I" -- and make sure it's during the beginning of a new tech revolution. Plus, in terms of success we are probably talking about the Apple II, released the year after the I.

Netflix started with funding from a previous successful venture and right out of the gate needed to fund N copies of nearly 1,000 DVDs. Wikipedia suggests they had "only" 30 employees at the beginning. One of the cofounders had prior mail-order experience--which is great, and counts! But the post here concludes with "I'll try a new career in marketing;" I hope it works out for him but notice there's a trend of prior experience or domain knowledge through several of these companies.

Google was the result of a multi-year PhD project and involved coming up with a new ranking approach (or, for the detractors, adjusting and applying an existing mathematical concept to directed graphs) and a somewhat fresh take on search UI. Then later they had to figure out ads to turn a profit.

Adding the M, Microsoft was founded after Gates and Allen had already created a tech company together prior, and they saw a market opportunity. I'm sort of sketchy on the history, but a quick search shows they developed Altair BASIC in around four months, reusing some of the work they'd one prior, had the advantage of using Harvard's infrastructure at least briefly, and IIRC sort of pretended they had a product when they didn't. Paul Allen is said to have written the bootloader they'd need while on the flight to their sales pitch. Probably no wi-fi or laptops on board that flight :)

You could say they all pivoted at some point or didn't hit on what would be their full potential from the outset, so it's important to get going on something. At the same time, it seems they found one solid product and took a risk on it, rather than taking a shotgun approach and seeing what stuck.

Overall I think there's much more planning and medium- or long-term slog involved in these companies to say they started simply. Though for most small businesses I do agree with the sibling posts to get going and test things out ASAP. I think being aggressive about culling ideas that aren't working is ok for SaaS or CRUD businesses, so you don't risk becoming a zombie company.

haha fair enough.

> Test market in 2 weeks for < $100

Could you elaborate on that one? Are you referring to landing page + ads?

Find customers willing to pay. Actively. Not passively.

Sorry, confused... What do you mean by actively / passively in this context? Actively "find" (work hard) or find customers that actively want to "pay" (who are really fans of your work)?

No one is a fan of your work, where do you hear this stuff..

Find people who will pay you to solve the problem you identified within two weeks.

Well, they're quitting a salaried position to try and take on freelance or small agency type work.

Aside from that - this really reads more of like a "journal" entry than an advice piece.

It is explicitly a journal entry.

Welcome to the Internet.

Although the article highlights that in the last year I started to work full time, I’ve been working as a programmer for 7 years during university. I had mentor which taught me a lot about programming which I’m eternally grateful for. I’ve worked before as a freelance developer and liked it pretty much.

Although I do understand it sounds like an impulsive action I just wanted to share how my thought process was in the last months. I never ask you to do the same or follow my steps, I simply share them.

I hope you do what you love cause in the end that matters the most.

I feel like this may be relevant: https://shefska.com/blog/i-quit-my-job

I documented my decision making process leading up to leaving the firm I was COO at. I was 24, and making $200k per year. I still knew entrepreneurship was the right decision. So glad I made the leap!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com