Ask HN: How long did you continue working your day job while working on an MVP? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How long did you continue working your day job while working on an MVP?

22 pointsopportune13 comments

Has anybody done this, and if so, how did it work out? Did you wait to quit until you got revenue or external funding? Anybody regret not committing 100% from day one?

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Back in 2011 myself and a few mates built our startup over 1 year. Mainly on weekends and sometimes after work, it was a long hard slog - but it ultimately got is into a startup accelerator.. which for me back then was one of my big goals.

We all quit our jobs when we got into the accelerator. I was young, and felt that had to be the way. In retrospect one (or two) of us could have continued working part time even at that point. The company slowly fizzled out over the following year. We failed to secure adequate funding, individually ran out of runway, with a splash of co-founder misalignment.

In retrospect we could have done a lot less, and figured all of it out sooner. Not sure if that was a helpful answer :)

Wow, this matches my 1st startup experience to a tee.

Yup :)

I'd recommend moonlighting until you feel you can't run your business. Can be a lot of things that determine that point, but it should feel pretty obvious.

I just checked to make sure you weren't one of my co-founders ;)

haha ironically u/thesandlord is my cofounder

One time I created a very simple Node.js hosting service while in between contracts. Got some signups but not a lot. I did continue to operate it for several months while doing other contracts. It's succeeded as far as the goals which were just to have a few paying customers for a system that did not take a lot of research to set up.

In one case, several years ago I started working on a Docker orchestration startup after one job ended and worked only on that startup for about 7-10 months (don't remember). I ended up stopping because by the time my MVP was more-or-less ready, Kubernetes was released and already extremely popular and I would be competing with Google and Amazon. I had an interesting system but it would not have been popular because it did not involve K8s. So when I ran out of savings and had to take a full-time contract I decided not to try to continue on the weekends.

Another time I spent over a year working weekends to build out this thing I called Vintage Simulator which basically embeds emulator screens in a Lua-scriptable 3D environment. I did dream about that becoming a business, but I was not necessarily expecting that. I was however hoping that vintage computer collectors or Lua programmers would be interested. I did not see a significant amount of interest though or any real evidence of serious users besides about two people. I still feel like there is potential if I keep pushing in that direction especially by developing marketing and content, but it's just not something I want to dedicate so much time to anymore.

My current fantasy which is occupying about 3-4 days of the week while I have a part-time contract is about computer vision and (down-the-line) robotics. It's possible I may have some financial crisis if I need to switch to a full-time job and end up abandoning it. But if that happens it's still highly motivating for training myself in machine learning and related fields. We will see. I have registered a company called General Biomimetics and imagine utilizing advanced 3d printing to create very lifelike robots. It is very good motivation. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRyCfDu...

So far I would say the only effort that actually turned into a real business (did not make a significant amount of money, but still made more than expenses) was the very simplistic Node.js hosting thing which I launched within a month of starting to build it out.

Such a competitive market these days, I would suggest committing 100% on your MVP AFTER you find your first few customers and know the market better.

We created our prototype in 5 days during summer vacation while working our day job. I quit my job when we got into the accelerator, the other founder kept working with his day job for about a year until we had an adequate funds.

I think your question frames a negative in a positive light, "committing 100%". A better question could be, "should I give up my income with no knowledge that anyone will be interested in my product?"

Most likely case (if you have savings): you wind up back in the workplace having lead a more interesting life and having spent your savings.

Worst case: like someone I know you are not able to return the salaried position you once had.

Best case: you get on an accelerator programme, get some support/money and your product takes off.