Ask HN: How Did You Escape 9 to 5?

I tried doing both for 2 months in parallel. One day I woke up and said "F*k this. I am done. Gotta quit". I then went to my boss and gave him the notice. I did calculate my risks as the business was just bringing in enough to keep me floating (with 2 kids and a wife). However on Day 1, my income was down by almost 75% (ouch, wifey was not quite happy but she supported)

Been 2 years since then and never been happier. It is tough, income is still less than I what I made in my cushy job but I will not give it up for that 9-5 bullshit. No more traffic to deal with (I hardly drive during rush hours now), no more commute (I work from where ever i want, mostly home office), I can take time off if I want or I could work on weekends if I want. The business runs 24-7 but I Don't have to.

Of course, not everyone is in a similar situation but we all have a path if you really want to do it. Bottomline is that you have to really really want this. It is almost like an addiction to do your own thing and not work in a shitty (Even if highly paid) 9-5 job. My job was so easy barring the shit commute. I could go in, talk to users all day, run projects, write some code and at the end of the day, I will get a big fat paycheck. People loved me at my job. I loved them back. Easy as hell. But I didn't want that anymore. I was not up to it anymore. I wanted to quit my "cushy" job.

I pretty much set my own hours, start work between 8am and 9am and end between 5pm and 6pm.

Some days I really get nothing done -- right now we're in the midst of buying a house, and I must confess I'm spending lots of time communicating with the lender and broker, packing, etc.

Other days, I work until midnight to get stuff done. It feels a bit like being self-employed, but of course you still take orders. But you also have the backing and resources of a larger organization. Kind of a transition to self-employment, you might say.

I do have a side business of playing music for weddings and other occasions, but that's pocket change and will never turn into full time.

Saved enough for business school tuition. Hated business school and dropped out. Was left with a wad of cash. Started business since I'd learn more from starting a business than staying in school.

Best decision of my career by far.

I'll do two things:

- Build and MVP and try to find paying customers. Once the money is flowing in, I might take a venture again into the startup world.

- Use a few hours / day to build the thing and start to look for a business co-founder.

I'm launching my first official product in Sept. and have been consulting to pay the bills. The consulting has been good...perhaps a little too good as I feel myself getting pulled away from the product as I'm still busy after raising my rates a few times already.

This generates one year of runway for every year worked. But my savings also grew thanks to some solid investments, so after six years I had ten years of runway.

Over the subsequent four years I spent down about 30% of my savings while working on startups of my own (I made some revenue, I took some small angel investment). Relationships and expertise that I built in the process allowed me to pivot into running a lucrative consultancy.

Before somebody says "you can only do that if you're young and unattached", I will add that I got married before I finished school, and our first child was born the same year I quit my tech industry job.

I'm still in the setup phase of my business (a hydroponics farm/green wall installations) but being able to devote entire days to getting going has been immensely helpful.

I started working the new contract about a month and a half ago. It was hard staying focused at first and I was a little too happy - go - lucky with my newfound freedom (Overwatch). So, while I was getting everything done for my 9-5, I've been moving slowly on the farm. Things have been better these past two weeks and I'm excited to get cranking in a serious way.

I should note that before I had even considered building a business or taking this step, I'd been doing research for the past 4 or so years that started my last semester in undergrad. I'd also done many small scale, non commercial projects for different clients in the evenings/weekends before I made the jump. Like another poster, to me, this is the equivalent to grad school. I could spend a bunch of money on an MBA and learn some things, or I could start this business, learn hands on, and potentially walk away with profit instead of debt.

The aforementioned employer then began to fail, and so I was extremely lucky to be able to devote more and more time to my business as the aforementioned startup started to ask people to work fewer hours.

Once I hit a revenue target agreed with my wife, I jumped ship: http://www.elstensoftware.com/blog/2011/01/21/going-fulltime...

To lower the target required, I cut pretty much everything apart from the mortgage and taxes.

In some ways I miss the constraint of working fewer hours - I think I had better focus then; these days I do make a few mistakes with where I spend my time.

The first year was insanely though - trying to find clients that would pay what I desired - and I went through severe bouts of depression when Canadian Winter hit. My close friends who knew about the situation told me to go back to employment, I wasn’t cut out for this.

But I went through that trough of sorrow and hit many breaks in 2015 with clients that valued me enough to more than make up the losses I had the previous year. Fast-forward to today and I earn enough from consulting that I spend more time on personal growth and working on my own projects than I need to work with clients to sustain my living.

It's probably the best decision I ever made. I'll make about 1.5x what I did as a 9-5er this year while I probably worked less hours overall. I work from home 80% of the time. No commute, so much less stress, I'm lucky to have great long-term clients (who I wouldn't have been able to acquire without my previous 9-5 time).

Eventually I want to bootstrap a startup - that's phase 2. I've built up enough of a cushion, even though child #2 arrives in a month. I've got a side-project going on that will hopefully turn into a business. I'm still figuring out how to best transition, because right now the $ is good and difficult to voluntarily turn down.

Everyone has its own way to work on a side project. Personaly, I worked every mornings, before work. Why ? Because my brain was fresher, my spirit less crowded by external thoughts. I could go to work without frustration, with the satisfaction of having worked on my own website. And at evening, I could hang out with my girlfriend or friends without feeling guilty.

https://medium.com/@m.taylor/zero-to-mvp-thirty-minutes-at-a...

I worked every evening, every weekend, on the tube on the way to and from the office. During my lunch hours. My coworkers knew not to interrupt me during lunch, because I always took a sandwich to the same desk, put my headphones on, and worked.

Have you seen that comic "You must burn", that's exactly it. It's painful, there's moments of crippling self doubt, there's moments when you'd rather be doing literally anything else, but you must burn through them. https://startupiceland.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/you-must-...

I had several failures. I launched an iPad app that failed. I launched several webapps that failed. In total, 4 "product launches" that failed and crashed and burnt, and countless more mini-projects that never finished or caught traction.

It took me years to get my first B2B client, but once I got it, I didn't have to work ever again, now I have 5 clients, and am concentrating on launching new products and growing and partnering.

Lots of times startups have a good codebase, but they are having hard problems with just a few parts of the product: they don't always have a lot of funding, but it's fun to make connections and help them succeed.

Though, it isn't so much "escape from the 9 to 5" as it is "now you work all the time."

Not that I always work more (some weeks are slow, others very busy) but I do find myself having to be available more.

I took a 30% cut on my unemployment benefits so I had no obligation to find work for 6 months. After unemployment benefits ended, I tried to find a bit of investment and also did a KS. Both failed, so I started to eat a retirement plan I still had.

Then I applied for another 3.5 months employment benefits ( was my right ), and I simulated trying to find work.

Then it got really ugly and did some parttime barista work. Sold some belongings.

Then the product got traction: https://mecoffee.nl

I've been working on the side project for 3 years before that. It's a SaaS web + mobile app. I worked on this project in my spare time (nights and sometimes during weekends). It was solving a problem that I was dealing with personally and I bet I was not the only one. The great thing with a side project is that you have no pressure and you can code features fast at the beginning. It was still a lot of work though but you don't feel it when it's your baby.

When it started to get traction (feedback from users is critical at this point) and some healthy revenue, I decided to take the plunge. France give you the opportunity to continue to earn something like 70% of your previous revenue (estimation, there are calculations rules) for 2 years in the case you create a new business.

I believe I found the motivation because my daily job was project manager but my side project was more of a developer job. Coding your own product without all the pain that a PM needs to resolve was a breath of fresh air. Combining the two competencies was also an advantage for learning to be an entrepreneur (even though I was more of a newbie as a developer compared to the devs I was working with in my previous company).

Now I'm enjoying it, I hired a few interns and joined an incubator in Paris.

I've worked on several projects since then, one of which (TaskforceApp.com) is making $500-$1500/mo. The other I just launched on HN about 3 weeks ago: http://www.IndieHackers.com. It's gotten almost 300k pageviews since launch, and I've lined up some awesome sponsors who combined are contributing about $1000/mo. My plan is to keep growing the site by adding interviews, writing more blog posts, and adding forums/AMAs.

If you're interested in hearing lots of other stories similar to this (most of which are more impressive), I recommend checking out Indie Hackers. I publish average monthly revenue stats in addition to interviews with the founders behind all these companies.

Right now doing 9-5 on top of part-time software consulting, mostly WordPress sites with trendy front-end stuff, but with occasional custom-backend and mobile app projects. I've partnered with a local design firm that outsources development and they provide me a steady stream of projects generate a majority of my side income). So far no marketing except for word-of-mouth advertising from happy clients.

I'm on track to do over $50k this year, but I don't think I can scale this any further without quitting my day job. My plan is to score another $XX,XXX project in the near future, stock up on cash and health insurance for my family, and finally take the leap.

My biggest concern is that we're dreaming of building a house in the next 3-5 years and how that'll affect my ability to secure a loan. We're planning on having the land paid off before we begin construction, but I still need to learn more.

Anyone have experience here?