Ask HN: Who has started a successful side business while having a full time job?

BTW, despite all the issues that 2020 & covid brought us, next week we're launching our v2: https://solokeys.com/v2.

I launched https://travelmap.net 7 years ago while working full time and stopped my job 3 years later to work on it full time

I finished out 2020 with a decent profit, and am now working towards learning the Xcode/Swift environment for iOS. I subscribed to a course on Udemy, and do an hour a day.

Most people are under the impression that having a successful side business requires an additional 40 hours a week. Find something you're passionate about, see if you can make money by doing it, and take a long-term approach to building up the skills required to be successful.

How you live each day is how you live your life. The small investments everyday add up!

In the second case I negotiated a 4 day work week. That helped me stay sane, but the one day on / six days off cadence made it hard to build momentum.

Putting in a little work on the side every day, as other commenters suggest, is probably the way to go. But it’s a different (and to me less rewarding) kind of work that can be done in small increments. Probably not deep work. Choose your business idea and responsibilities accordingly! And be patient.

It’s actually not about time but about energy levels.

To be able to accomplish this, you setup your life to have maximal energy level balance throughout the day.

For me that meant to unfortunately leave my girlfriend at home almost every evening the past year to get a few hours in almost everyday until I was done.

This also included eating the same food (ready made from Lidl) everyday and just saying no to everything and everyone all the time.

I also recommend that you try to take as little responsibility you can at work and perhaps working from home if possible, where you then use half the day for your own stuff.

One of the few benefits of this lifestyle/endeavour is that you have an income while trying your startup idea.

I've made plenty of mistakes. It has evolved tremendously over time. It's now almost completely passive, and by adjusting a few levers could be profitable. But it does not - and likely will not - have scale. It also has vulnerabilities that I "can't" (read: won't) address while also working FT.

So it's hard to say objectively whether it's successful. But as a learning experience it has been worth its weight in gold. The diverse hard and soft skills you accumulate in the course of keeping your side hustle afloat while spending minimal money are endlessly valuable. Most of them come from learning the hard way. But that's what makes them stick. I've applied some of these skills and lessons learned to newer projects with positive results.

A few takeaways:

1.) If you can sift through the mountains of B.S., there is extremely high-quality, free content available to learn about building and scaling startups (e.g. YC Startup School, books, etc.). So not knowing what to do, per se, is not the issue. The real issue is knowing what hard-but-necessary things you should probably do, but not doing them.

2.) So, about those hard-but-necessary things. Working a "day job" and coming home to your side business can be exhausting. This exhaustion can further discourage you from doing the necessary things to grow your startup. To overcome motivation draughts and other mental hurdles, it's helpful to have some combination of the following: A.) a co-founder to share the load, B.) added accountability, e.g. employees, investors, C.) a valuable network with the resources or knowledge to pull you past certain plateaus, and/or D.) extreme passion and enthusiasm for the category / business.

3.) The ultimate challenge is finding balance. Yes, you will need to make sacrifices. But the experience forces you to be acutely aware of how you allocate your energy and attention. For example: Does spending a few hours per week exercising actually provide a net-positive affect on overall productivity? Does 20 minutes of clear-headed morning work before commuting accomplish as much as 1 hour of exhausted, post-commute work? While we're at it, is there "dead time" you could be using to work on your side business (e.g. commuting, watching Netflix, sitting on your phone waiting for food, etc.)? Are you already over-committed and stretched at work? Could you talk to your boss about your workload, find someone to delegate to, or negotiate a more flexible work arrangement? Are you spending an hour most nights with your significant other but your mind is elsewhere, or are you spending forty-five min where you're totally present? The list goes on. This exercise in itself is valuable even if your startup ultimately fails.

4.) Finally, in my experience, you can build a profitable product and achieve PMF while working a day job. These things require mostly a good tactics and knowledge (see #1). The true hurdle becomes scale. Scale requires resources - you could throw money at it, but that's rarely sustainable. It's better to use your time, ingenuity, sweat equity, and enthusiasm and hope the flywheel starts turning. But these are in short supply when you're already contending with a day job and other priorities. You can optimize your days (see #3). You can put controls in place to contend with inevitable hurdles (see #2).

5.) Ultimately, you need to define what success looks like for your side-business. Whatever your goal, day job or not, value comes from finding and solving the most interesting and commercially viable problem you can. Without this, the challenges of running a side business while working FT grow exponentially.

Working out helps me a lot and allows me to refresh and get more capacity. Sure, there are days where I'm squeezed out, but enough sleep also helps. What I've also learned is, use anything you have to, to get the job done and don't focus on optimization and scaling problems at all. Make sure to throw away features that don't add any value now and always keep that in mind. If you are careful about these points, you can certainly accelerate.

Maybe it was only possible in the last decade (2009-2020) due to the stock market being in a valley when I started investing a large percentage of my income each year, but I now make 6 figures a year in dividends and capital gains from my investments in S&P funds. I did live frugally and sacrificed a lot, and it probably helped that I do not have a family nor a mortgage.

Because I still live way beneath my means, this "business" continues to grow exponentially year after year, and I'll be able to retire pretty comfortably in my mid 40's (estimate). It takes very little of my time (compared to an actual business like Ebay reselling or some small SAAS that I could create). I know it's not the type of side-hustle many on this site imagine, but it probably is more feasible for those who don't have any million-dollar ideas, don't want to put in the time and energy into a high-risk venture, and already enjoy (or can tolerate) their day job that pays well enough.

I was able to leave my full time job and go all in on my own business about a year later and have been self employed ever since.

It just takes a lot of patience, motivation and a willingness to give up some of your free time.

One thing is that my day job did not demand heroic hours, and I have a very short commute. I live in a cheap region, so I have plenty of space in my house for all operations.

Another factor is that the market itself is such that my business will never grow beyond a certain size. I make and ship a few gadgets a week. I'm successful inasmuch as the business adds a few thousand dollars per year to the kitty. Playing music has also produced a net income if you don't count what my parents paid for lessons. ;-)

An interesting nuance is that my product contains no Code. My market doesn't judge my credibility by the sophistication of my web page. It is not technically passive income, but semi-passive in the sense that the baseline attention it demands is utterly predictable from month to month.

The lack of Code is by intent, to provide a contrast with what I do all day.

> If you have, how did you do it?

I do side projects for 2 major reasons: to build something I'd like to use myself, and to learn/practice tech skills that I can't at my day job. Its just about consistently making a little time every week to move things forward.

I’m hoping to recapture that with my new side project, Perligo. I haven’t launched yet, so we’ll see how it goes. But my main advice would be start small. Small things don’t take a ton of time. Graphite was super small at first. Grow as your time allows.