"Startup" usually means a company that fulfills a few of the below:
- something the founders do full-time
- less than 3 years old
- in a bootstrap phase or burning VC money
- in search of a business model (not yet profitable)
- has the potential to grow
You are nitpicking and not delivering answer even if you are right. What if I have officially registered company that fulfills all of your points but full-time?
The "bootstrap" part can include initial phases being funded by a day-job or consulting though. People don't always quit their jobs right at the beginning, but might if it starts taking off.
No problem with that, I just think "project" is a better term as long as it's an after 6PM affair. To me a "startup" implies additional commitment and risk due to the absence of a cushy day job.
I think that you're talking about a very specific type of startup business.
People start and build businesses while employed all of the time. Some of those businesses require that the owners devote their full energies to them at a certain milestone.
Others do not -- plenty of software and consulting roles do not require 100% commitment, particularly if you have a flexible employer and can bootstrap. Many college professors have side gigs, for example.
You kinda missed the point. Consulting can be a side gig that stays a side gig.
Other businesses can start slow/small, but you reach a point where you need to choose between the full time gig and your startup. There are a few clear examples of this phenomenon in this thread.
This is such a brilliant point. I find the coder "puritanism" leaking into startups and I can't say I agree with it.
Starting a business has been done in many ways. Having been in business for 15 years I have gotten to meet a lot of other small business owners and there is as much variety in how established businesses came to be.
Having this delusion of its only a "real" startup if you do it this way is hogwash. So many great businesses were built on hard work, sacrifice, long hours, juggling more than one thing at once, until the new business could stand on it's own two feet.
Knowing when, and what your new business needs (more time, stepping away from other obligations) is a critical skill. Simply committing all of your time to one thing without a wider business, or varied experience can in some cases be a detriment.
I agree with this comment. Saying 'start-up' has a load of baggage and hype attached to it... better off just saying something like: spare time project. There are lots of people running websites that make money, but I don't think they would call them start-ups.
I must be doing something wrong then. I'm constantly running out of time. I'm always thinking about who to meet, who to talk to, what to change in order to become better. Not to mention optimizing text, updating the blog, doing the paperwork... I don't understand the 'waiting' part really.
then you probably just started...I don't mean the first few weeks after you launch...there is plenty of things to do then.
I mean that period for all sites after the launch coverage, the time where your traffic goes down to almost 0.
Who to meet/who to talk to...should have been done prior to launch.
optimizing text? it takes a while to do a/b testing if your traffic is tiny...same goes for seeing results from marketing campaigns.
updating the blog? that takes a few hours each week.
I mean sure, there is plenty of things to keep you busy, but most of it is just busy work you assign yourself because you are thinking "hey, I'm doing a startup, I should be doing something"
I am just getting started indeed. However, I talked to a lot of potential users and did the research before I started. Checked out the legal stuff, negotiated with lawyers and developers.
But I don't stop talking / researching now I'm actually running it. I'm asking (potential) users for feedback all the time. I'm planning a new price-strategy, meeting a former competitor, talking to models and to commercial photographers the next two weeks. It's amazing how one talk leads to the other. Also because I'm on a tight budget I try to help other people so they can help me out.
You must be joking right? Except you're not, which makes it sad instead of funny.
It must be very comfortable to not see the endless opportunities in increasing traction for your service after launch. Not even bothering to commit code any longer, since it was perfect at launch. Or doing marketing, sales, community and customer support, PR, ops, paying bills, sending invoices, handling complaints, bookkeeping, etc etc.
I never ever had the problem to keep myself busy, the problem is always prioritizing among the plethora of tasks you need to do and accepting the fact that you never will be able to do all of them.
Not bothering to commit code? If it works, and you don't have actual customers yet? Then yes...it's just busy work at that point.
Community/Customer Support? I dunno about you, but customer support is only required for less than 1% of users. And even then it's usually a case of 1-2 sentences.
Paying bills? How many bills do you have as a startup?
I started StyleFeeder in January, 2005, built it into a profitable company of 8 people and sold it to Time Inc in January 2010.
From January, 2005 through May, 2006, I worked on StyleFeeder on the side - while I had a pretty demanding day job, mind you - as I built up the basic business... until I had invested so much time and effort into it that I was maxed out and needed to find a way to work on it full time with the help of others.
I don't see any plausible way that I could have made it into anything significant while at the same time working a day job. I think some people can do it with some businesses, but I think it would have been impossible in my case.
But the bootstrapping phase, yes, I think you can do that while working a day job. That's very common.
Hey - we're building a similar site (fashion search, UK based), and yours has always been one of our comparison sites. Nice job, didn't realize you were a HN'er :)
Well, I would be happy to hear about things such as:
* Which features did your first version have?
* How did you get your first users?
* Did StyleFeeder rely on B2B connections, if so how did you find/create them?
* What was StyleFeeder's business model?
* When did you start looking for funding/why/how?
Thanks for the time and experience sharing!
* Basic social sharing of products, fancy bookmarklet, following other people and then we quickly moved into some high-end realtime recommendation technology.
* At first, it was just friends and family spreading the word. Our first big jump came after our bizdev guy joined and he did a deal with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to feature us on their homepage and for them to create accounts and share products they were interested in with their fans. We did a bunch of other celebrity stuff. Then, we really grew right after the Facebook platform launched. SEO was also a major factor.
* B2B connections were largely a waste of time.
* 90% affiliate, 10% advertising.
* Funding: I didn't pursue it at first, but smarter people than I saw the bigger opportunity that I hadn't tuned into yet and made introductions.
Sure, fashion search/bookmarking is a commodity - that's why those sites don't succeed.
I think discovery services are more nuanced than this and it's easier to understand the value they bring both to users and retailers, so we positioned ourselves as a "personal shopping engine." The goal was to shift users away from the Google search box towards a service geared towards shopping. I'm sure you can see value in that.
Hot company du jour is Pinterest... probably headed towards 3B pvs/month and recently closed a round of funding at $200-250M. Keep an eye on them if you think it's all still a commodity. It just depends on what lens you look through. Part of the challenge is putting aside one's cynicism and trying to positive about what your company _can_ be or _could_ be if people take it seriously.
Easy: without venture funding, I would have just been a guy sitting on the couch at home with nobody to work on this with. And the hosting costs alone to run a site that large are around $25K/month.
Yes, we had reached 7 figure revenues many years ago, long before the acquisition.
25K a month? Really? That's like 50 medium Amazon instances.. all for at most a couple million uniques a month? What were you doing that required so much servers?
If you're all presuming that EC2 is some magical pixie dust for reducing the costs of running a large site, that's not the case. We had ~10 EC2 boxes and 15 managed servers at Contegix, CDN, Dynect, email service provider and a few more services thrown in.
It's not any less expensive today because those numbers I gave are current numbers.
How did you know it was time to raise? Was it because you could not afford the hosting bill anymore, or that you were getting lots of traffic and not enough time to build out the product, or...?
I finally had a better understanding of the context of the opportunity and started to think big. And I found people I liked who understood the vision and were willing to back the idea.
The hosting bill back then was ~$100/month since it all ran on a single box so, no, that wasn't a factor. It was a question of opportunity and not costs.
I'm doing that right now. My startup is selling you, your kids and the girl next door. Heck, I can even sell your grandmother!
Advertising agency's (my day job) can rent them for a fixed price. Royalties included.
(I'm not spamming. You're not my targets and only Dutch people can read it anyway). But have a look at the several hundred people that signed up if you're interested: http://royaltyfreemodels.nl/zoeken/page:11
I built an online payroll service for Canadian families who hire staff like nannies or home care workers, or small businesses that wanted a very simple payroll solution. At the same time I had a day job.
I wasn't raking in money but I had customers and my revenues exceeded my small expenses.
Over the summer I sold the company and went to work for the acquiring company. In retrospect, this was probably the best move for me (I had considered taking investment to move to it full time.)
Like one of the answers above, I don't think I could have grown the business significantly without spending more time on it, and for me (day job, 3 young kids) this was the only way I could have done it.
What's the point of this question? There are people who did that and that's possible. patio11 is one example and I must say very good one.
I am example of person who has not managed to do that in 3 years but I have learned a lot and my trial contributed to my well-being in many positive ways. Some of those are like salary growing faster than planned and some are small but pleasant things like Nokia N950.
It looks like two options: you have read only first sentence of my comment or I am not clear enough. I have tried to do two things:
1) I have encouraged question's author to do that anyway even if there will be no profit because that has indirect positive effect;
2) I have tried to point out that such question is wrong to ask and there is very simple reason for that. It will attract only people who have succeeded in doing that: they will write what they did, maybe how they did that and maybe will try to identify reasons why they succeeded (not necessary correctly).
For every successful startup there are 10 unsuccessful (unprofitable) and if stating the reality is complaining then well OK - all who downvoted me has right to live in their rosy dream illusion world where they get rich just by reading HN.
1. You asked, I answered. I did/can not up vote or down vote your post as a result.
2. The OP asked a question, and you questioned why they should ask. More importantly, you merely pointed out that yes, people have, and have not been successful at it.
3. If you intended for something else, you weren't clear. Mostly because you didn't say anything. What you did say didn't amount to something that offered anything constructive, hence the down votes.
> For every successful startup there are 10 unsuccessful (unprofitable) and if stating the reality is complaining then well OK - all who downvoted me has right to live in their rosy dream illusion world where they get rich just by reading HN.
But see, you didn't say that. You didn't come close to saying that. You might think you did, but I assure you, you didn't come close. Your comment wasn't insightful or intelligent. You wanted to know why you got down voted, I told you. Don't try and now pass this off by labelling those who down voted you.
My partner and I started return7 with $800 (mostly design, Apple dev fee, etc.) in 2008 when the App Store opened up. BillMinder, our main app, is profitable.
I'm not sure if they are considered startups per say, but I've started two profitable companies while working a day job (to the point where I could quit my day job!) http://www.AUsedCar.com and http://www.BudgetSimple.com . I should say I also created a failed startup during that time. The biggest difference between the successes and the failure were that the successes did not require me to answer phone calls, make sales etc... In other words, completely passive income businesses are the easiest to do with a day job.
It's very difficult to compete with the big names, but even .01% of a huge market adds up to something significant.
edit I should also say I started this a LONG time ago, so I have a long tail SEO advantage. I wouldn't envy anyone trying to start a used car site today.
How much did that discourage you in the beginning (the thought of it being extremely hard to compete w/the big names)?
I ask b/c I've been developing an app of my own and this is one of the doubts I have. I love building stuff too much to let that stop me, but it's still something I think about from time to time.
Well the beginning was 1995, so I was competing with Newspapers and Weekly Magazines more then websites. People would refuse to let me list their car for free because they were scared of the Internet.
I'd be interested in talking about BudgetSimple and some specifics of tactics and implementation if you have the time and interest. Handle at whitetailsoftware dot com.
I started doing affiliate marketing and building websites on the side for about two years before handing my notice. I could have quit after few months where my revenues from the side job exceeded what I had in my day job as a software developer. Nevertheless it took about 2 years because I was scared, I should have quit much sooner. Now 4 years later we are doing 7-figures a year.
I think its the best way to start a company because you are only risking sweat-equity. The danger is that your day job holds you from growing your startup more.
I've achieved this in school if that counts. GetDealy which runs flash sales for designers and geeks has 35,000+ users and 2.3 million credits earned, which is our rewards system.
I have two profitable SaaS products that were built while I was theoretically working full time on something else. I was a bit fortunate that my "something else" was Consulting, which you can ramp down by exactly as many hours per week as you'd like to devote to your side project.
The thing is, if you use the term "Startup" here to describe anything other than a zero-profit 80hr/week scramble for VC funding and eventual acquisition, you're going to get people popping up and claiming that what you're doing is not startuppy enough to count. So for the benefit of that crowd, you might want to rephrase your question in terms of building a product that brings in enough revenue to quit your job.
If that's what you want to build, then yes. It's absolutely possible, and there are dozens of people here who have done so.
I have always had a problem with that. A start-up is a start-up if you decide it's a start-up and want to transform it into a viable business. There is no magic line that you have to cross to transform your project into a start-up. I always advice people to call their projects a start-up from the beginning.
> I always advice people to call their projects a start-up from the beginning
Could you expand on why you advice this, meaning, what is the advantage of it?
According to your post simple message above it could be the other way around (always call your startup a project).
First of all, it makes you take it seriously. It's not a side project that you are doing. You think of it as work as something that is going to pay your bills at some point. You work harder, you take smarter decisions and you start thinking about customers early.
Secondly, other people take it more seriously. Everyone has some sort of a side project, very few people have a start-up. They give you more time and listen to your more intently.
I prefer not calling projects startups, Since, I try many projects, So, calling something startup, after "rails new project_name" sounds like a disgrace to a startup to me.
Your latter input is appreciated, but I'm not sure being a "full-time consultant" qualifies you to answer this question, which is almost certainly directed at those with less daily flexibility. If my site explodes in activity while I'm at work, I can literally do nothing to sop up any problems that might arise, unless I decide to try to cash in sick time and head out early, or sit on my hands til I get home. A fulltime consultant faces none of these issues.
I've done it too... but yeah, it is not so nice for the employer. I'd much rather have someone like dclowd9901 working for me than someone like you or me.
If you do run a side business and keep a dayjob at the same time, you need to know going in that you won't be 100% for that dayjob. I mean, you can make excuses for it, like nobody is 100% for their dayjob; other people have kids they have to deal with, etc... but in the end? you are choosing your own interests over your employer's.
I'm okay with that.
(I mean, I was up front when I'm hired that I had this other thing going on; but I recognize that I was a much worse employee than I would have been otherwise.)
I can see how my comments and actions could be taken negatively, but I disagree with that generic statement. Yes it can be not so nice for the employer, but it could also have zero negative impact.
I was able to successfully do with zero negative impact. In fact, the flexibility that I trained my employer to have, made me a happier and more productive employee for that company. The ability to attend to my personal business, regardless of what it was, made me appreciate them and work harder for them.
>I'd much rather have someone like dclowd9901 working for me than someone like you or me.
It took me 10 years of working on a few apps on the side, but today they are a $600K/year business and my full time job. Not the shoot-for-the-moon social apps everyone wants to do, but I'm quite happy.
My current company started out as a side project. I decided to make it a fulltime project after about three years. We are quite profitable.
Today, we operate a few "premium" domain name businesses, but we started with a rather obscure one, and did well enough to purchase more properties from cash flow.
I found it incredibly difficult to provide the value I'd expect out of an employee at a "day job" while building my business on the side. Ultimately, I took a different route. Note that this plan works best for young, single folks. This is also not a "get rich quick" scheme. Positioning myself took about three years on its own, much less getting going on a start-up. Keep in mind that this was my plan. It is not the only (or best) plan, but it worked for me.
* Position yourself for minimum cash outflow. Minimizing your cash needs means you can take bigger risks. I found a decent 500 sq ft apartment and drove a cheap car. Without a family, all my other expenses were dirt cheap.
* Save up a three month buffer and strike out on your own gig, but not your start-up yet. I chose consulting because the income potential is so high and it provided a great networking opportunity. I doubled my annual income (from my old salary) within a year, but far more importantly, I was able to accomplish a few transitional steps in getting my start-up going:
- I built a relationship with a great developer by feeding him work from consulting clients.
- I built relationships with other business owners and took a lot of time to understand their business.
- Ultimately, I met the person who would connect me with the greatest team I've ever worked with.
By the time I found the right team and opportunity, I had a year's worth of expenses saved up, and a small amount of money to contribute to the operational expenses of the company. Coming to the table with cash in-hand gained me a lot of respect from other team members. Because everyone came to the table with their own income streams, we were able to bootstrap and now, 100% of our equity is founder owned. That's a pretty exciting reality for us.
I've been thinking about going on a similar path. I've already built up the buffer, but I'm not quite sure the best way to find consulting relationships. What did you do?
I'm actually working on a startup while in school (not technically a day job, but similar). I think my idea has a ton of potential in the market I'm aiming for, so I've been working on it for almost a year now.
I and 2 cofounders are near to launching our iphone app and we have our daily job.
I'm the backend and frontend developer(rest-full api needed for our iphone app), the other two are the creative guys,
and I've to admit that it has been hard to think, design, and do a product in a spare time(especially if you have a wife and a child).
And there are other aspects of the launching such as the site, the company to found and many things that require a lot of time.
I hope the app and the business I want to build around succeded so I will quit my current profitable job.
I started a couple of profitable small businesses while working a ton of hours management consulting, including a headphone website where I used all my vacation to travel to China to get my products manufactured cheaper. I was hoping to do a few things on the side until it made sense to quit my day job, but I found it never made sense to quit my day job.
All at the same time (May 2010)
Any one of those are enough to make you go crazy, but he managed all 3. (note: FeeFighters is not profitable)
He also previously started http://tss-radio.com and bootstrapped it to a spot on the inc 500 list, all on the side while working at a VC firm (Longworth) and then while at BCG (management consulting).
Do you have a blog or anything where you've written about your trip to china? I've been reselling Chinese goods for about a year and a half and I've always wanted to go over there.
196 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] thread"Startup" usually means a company that fulfills a few of the below:
A profitable startup with a great business model which doesn't need to give away ownership for VC money is the perfect startup.
Any business that's new counts as a startup for me.
People start and build businesses while employed all of the time. Some of those businesses require that the owners devote their full energies to them at a certain milestone.
Others do not -- plenty of software and consulting roles do not require 100% commitment, particularly if you have a flexible employer and can bootstrap. Many college professors have side gigs, for example.
Other businesses can start slow/small, but you reach a point where you need to choose between the full time gig and your startup. There are a few clear examples of this phenomenon in this thread.
Starting a business has been done in many ways. Having been in business for 15 years I have gotten to meet a lot of other small business owners and there is as much variety in how established businesses came to be.
Having this delusion of its only a "real" startup if you do it this way is hogwash. So many great businesses were built on hard work, sacrifice, long hours, juggling more than one thing at once, until the new business could stand on it's own two feet.
Knowing when, and what your new business needs (more time, stepping away from other obligations) is a critical skill. Simply committing all of your time to one thing without a wider business, or varied experience can in some cases be a detriment.
Especially since coding is a tiny iota of actually doing one, most of it boils down to marketing anyways
I mean that period for all sites after the launch coverage, the time where your traffic goes down to almost 0.
Who to meet/who to talk to...should have been done prior to launch.
optimizing text? it takes a while to do a/b testing if your traffic is tiny...same goes for seeing results from marketing campaigns.
updating the blog? that takes a few hours each week.
I mean sure, there is plenty of things to keep you busy, but most of it is just busy work you assign yourself because you are thinking "hey, I'm doing a startup, I should be doing something"
Blogging about it as well: http://royfreemod.tumblr.com/
It must be very comfortable to not see the endless opportunities in increasing traction for your service after launch. Not even bothering to commit code any longer, since it was perfect at launch. Or doing marketing, sales, community and customer support, PR, ops, paying bills, sending invoices, handling complaints, bookkeeping, etc etc.
I never ever had the problem to keep myself busy, the problem is always prioritizing among the plethora of tasks you need to do and accepting the fact that you never will be able to do all of them.
Not bothering to commit code? If it works, and you don't have actual customers yet? Then yes...it's just busy work at that point.
Community/Customer Support? I dunno about you, but customer support is only required for less than 1% of users. And even then it's usually a case of 1-2 sentences.
Paying bills? How many bills do you have as a startup?
And even then, "hundreds" of bills is crap...unless of course you count every purchase on your credit card statement as a "bill"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795760
From January, 2005 through May, 2006, I worked on StyleFeeder on the side - while I had a pretty demanding day job, mind you - as I built up the basic business... until I had invested so much time and effort into it that I was maxed out and needed to find a way to work on it full time with the help of others.
I don't see any plausible way that I could have made it into anything significant while at the same time working a day job. I think some people can do it with some businesses, but I think it would have been impossible in my case.
But the bootstrapping phase, yes, I think you can do that while working a day job. That's very common.
More details here:
http://www.whirlycott.com/phil/2011/08/05/stylefeeder-histor...
http://www.whirlycott.com/phil/2005/10/17/stylefeeder-step-1...
LMK if that's not what you are looking for.
* Basic social sharing of products, fancy bookmarklet, following other people and then we quickly moved into some high-end realtime recommendation technology.
* At first, it was just friends and family spreading the word. Our first big jump came after our bizdev guy joined and he did a deal with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to feature us on their homepage and for them to create accounts and share products they were interested in with their fans. We did a bunch of other celebrity stuff. Then, we really grew right after the Facebook platform launched. SEO was also a major factor.
* B2B connections were largely a waste of time.
* 90% affiliate, 10% advertising.
* Funding: I didn't pursue it at first, but smarter people than I saw the bigger opportunity that I hadn't tuned into yet and made introductions.
Sure, fashion search/bookmarking is a commodity - that's why those sites don't succeed.
I think discovery services are more nuanced than this and it's easier to understand the value they bring both to users and retailers, so we positioned ourselves as a "personal shopping engine." The goal was to shift users away from the Google search box towards a service geared towards shopping. I'm sure you can see value in that.
Hot company du jour is Pinterest... probably headed towards 3B pvs/month and recently closed a round of funding at $200-250M. Keep an eye on them if you think it's all still a commodity. It just depends on what lens you look through. Part of the challenge is putting aside one's cynicism and trying to positive about what your company _can_ be or _could_ be if people take it seriously.
Also, it seems you sold StyleFeeder at the right time: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stylefeeder.com/ Looks like Time Inc isn't doing a great job with maintaining and increasing users.
Edit: Had you reach 7 figure revenue yet?
Yes, we had reached 7 figure revenues many years ago, long before the acquisition.
It's not any less expensive today because those numbers I gave are current numbers.
The hosting bill back then was ~$100/month since it all ran on a single box so, no, that wasn't a factor. It was a question of opportunity and not costs.
Advertising agency's (my day job) can rent them for a fixed price. Royalties included.
(I'm not spamming. You're not my targets and only Dutch people can read it anyway). But have a look at the several hundred people that signed up if you're interested: http://royaltyfreemodels.nl/zoeken/page:11
(It's run on CakePHP for the interested).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3238834
I wasn't raking in money but I had customers and my revenues exceeded my small expenses.
Over the summer I sold the company and went to work for the acquiring company. In retrospect, this was probably the best move for me (I had considered taking investment to move to it full time.)
Like one of the answers above, I don't think I could have grown the business significantly without spending more time on it, and for me (day job, 3 young kids) this was the only way I could have done it.
I am example of person who has not managed to do that in 3 years but I have learned a lot and my trial contributed to my well-being in many positive ways. Some of those are like salary growing faster than planned and some are small but pleasant things like Nokia N950.
1) I have encouraged question's author to do that anyway even if there will be no profit because that has indirect positive effect;
2) I have tried to point out that such question is wrong to ask and there is very simple reason for that. It will attract only people who have succeeded in doing that: they will write what they did, maybe how they did that and maybe will try to identify reasons why they succeeded (not necessary correctly).
For every successful startup there are 10 unsuccessful (unprofitable) and if stating the reality is complaining then well OK - all who downvoted me has right to live in their rosy dream illusion world where they get rich just by reading HN.
2. The OP asked a question, and you questioned why they should ask. More importantly, you merely pointed out that yes, people have, and have not been successful at it.
3. If you intended for something else, you weren't clear. Mostly because you didn't say anything. What you did say didn't amount to something that offered anything constructive, hence the down votes.
> For every successful startup there are 10 unsuccessful (unprofitable) and if stating the reality is complaining then well OK - all who downvoted me has right to live in their rosy dream illusion world where they get rich just by reading HN.
But see, you didn't say that. You didn't come close to saying that. You might think you did, but I assure you, you didn't come close. Your comment wasn't insightful or intelligent. You wanted to know why you got down voted, I told you. Don't try and now pass this off by labelling those who down voted you.
AUsedCar.com
How does that site compare in a very busy market with established big name players?
Thanks
edit I should also say I started this a LONG time ago, so I have a long tail SEO advantage. I wouldn't envy anyone trying to start a used car site today.
I ask b/c I've been developing an app of my own and this is one of the doubts I have. I love building stuff too much to let that stop me, but it's still something I think about from time to time.
I think its the best way to start a company because you are only risking sweat-equity. The danger is that your day job holds you from growing your startup more.
Rather than working 8-10 hours on your startup and having some free time. You work 8 hours and spend all of your free time on your startup.
I prefer getting some capital saved and then quitting your day job.
http://getdealy.com
The thing is, if you use the term "Startup" here to describe anything other than a zero-profit 80hr/week scramble for VC funding and eventual acquisition, you're going to get people popping up and claiming that what you're doing is not startuppy enough to count. So for the benefit of that crowd, you might want to rephrase your question in terms of building a product that brings in enough revenue to quit your job.
If that's what you want to build, then yes. It's absolutely possible, and there are dozens of people here who have done so.
I have always had a problem with that. A start-up is a start-up if you decide it's a start-up and want to transform it into a viable business. There is no magic line that you have to cross to transform your project into a start-up. I always advice people to call their projects a start-up from the beginning.
Could you expand on why you advice this, meaning, what is the advantage of it? According to your post simple message above it could be the other way around (always call your startup a project).
Secondly, other people take it more seriously. Everyone has some sort of a side project, very few people have a start-up. They give you more time and listen to your more intently.
All anecdotal, no data to back any of the claims.
(ofcourse, opinions differs)
Have you trained your job (bosses) to understand that you take periodic breaks outside of the building (i.e. grab coffee)?
Once you have, you simply grab your bag, with personal laptop, hit the wifi enabled coffee shop, and stop or at least slow down the fire.
I've done it. You lack creativity :)
If you do run a side business and keep a dayjob at the same time, you need to know going in that you won't be 100% for that dayjob. I mean, you can make excuses for it, like nobody is 100% for their dayjob; other people have kids they have to deal with, etc... but in the end? you are choosing your own interests over your employer's.
I'm okay with that.
(I mean, I was up front when I'm hired that I had this other thing going on; but I recognize that I was a much worse employee than I would have been otherwise.)
I can see how my comments and actions could be taken negatively, but I disagree with that generic statement. Yes it can be not so nice for the employer, but it could also have zero negative impact.
I was able to successfully do with zero negative impact. In fact, the flexibility that I trained my employer to have, made me a happier and more productive employee for that company. The ability to attend to my personal business, regardless of what it was, made me appreciate them and work harder for them.
>I'd much rather have someone like dclowd9901 working for me than someone like you or me.
Please don't lump me into that category.
It's quite possible that I'm wrong, of course.
My current company started out as a side project. I decided to make it a fulltime project after about three years. We are quite profitable.
Today, we operate a few "premium" domain name businesses, but we started with a rather obscure one, and did well enough to purchase more properties from cash flow.
* Position yourself for minimum cash outflow. Minimizing your cash needs means you can take bigger risks. I found a decent 500 sq ft apartment and drove a cheap car. Without a family, all my other expenses were dirt cheap.
* Save up a three month buffer and strike out on your own gig, but not your start-up yet. I chose consulting because the income potential is so high and it provided a great networking opportunity. I doubled my annual income (from my old salary) within a year, but far more importantly, I was able to accomplish a few transitional steps in getting my start-up going:
- I built a relationship with a great developer by feeding him work from consulting clients.
- I built relationships with other business owners and took a lot of time to understand their business.
- Ultimately, I met the person who would connect me with the greatest team I've ever worked with.
By the time I found the right team and opportunity, I had a year's worth of expenses saved up, and a small amount of money to contribute to the operational expenses of the company. Coming to the table with cash in-hand gained me a lot of respect from other team members. Because everyone came to the table with their own income streams, we were able to bootstrap and now, 100% of our equity is founder owned. That's a pretty exciting reality for us.
I'm the backend and frontend developer(rest-full api needed for our iphone app), the other two are the creative guys, and I've to admit that it has been hard to think, design, and do a product in a spare time(especially if you have a wife and a child).
And there are other aspects of the launching such as the site, the company to found and many things that require a lot of time.
I hope the app and the business I want to build around succeded so I will quit my current profitable job.
More incredibly to me is FeeFighters (http://feefighters.com) CEO Sean was
1) Raising a VC round
2) Having his first kid
and 3) Working full-time at BCG
All at the same time (May 2010) Any one of those are enough to make you go crazy, but he managed all 3. (note: FeeFighters is not profitable)
He also previously started http://tss-radio.com and bootstrapped it to a spot on the inc 500 list, all on the side while working at a VC firm (Longworth) and then while at BCG (management consulting).
So yes it can be done.