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Ask HN: How long until you became "ramen profitable"?

36 points by Bluem00 ↗ HN
So you quit your job to run your own company. Would you please share how long it took you to become "ramen profitable"? I'd love to hear other details, like how many products you tried out, whether you decided to go back to working for someone else, or any other aspects of the experience that might be of interest.

I was inspired to ask the question after reading this "I Quit" 1-year anniversary post: http://www.emadibrahim.com/2009/03/09/i-quit-1-year-anniversary/

Thanks!

22 comments

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staunch
You should make this a poll, and don't forget the "I'm still not ramen profitable" option that most people will choose :-)
tom_rath
Eleven months from empty text editor to 'ramen profitability'. Only one product was developed but about four others were considered before I focused on a clearly defined market filled with customers who were willing to pay for software.

The position I started from was zero debt and about two years of comfortable living expenses saved. That turned out to be essential.

Contract work was offered and was very tempting to accept, but I knew if I took it I'd find it difficult to focus on product development -- so I passed it up. Once you have a steady income (whether from a salaried job or from contracts), it's very difficult to go back to working for zero dollars per hour and an unproven idea you think might work one day.

hedgehog
I left the previous startup last January (was there about five years). Between travels I did a few projects:

- Contract app development. - Wrote some graphics code for fun (real-time voxel renderer). - Wrote a web app as an experiment (web clippings tool).

What I learned: Contract development is not for me. Writing code for myself is much more satisfying, the graphics project was really a lot of fun. From the clippings app (clipng.com, it works and I use it but it could use some polish) I learned that working on your own is a lot harder than working in a team. At the same time, finding co-founders is really difficult.

In January I decided to join up with a seed-stage company whose CEO I met at a networking event. They have a good business model but needed someone to take over engineering and get the product shipped. So far that's working out well from a business standpoint and it has me at ramen-sustainable cash flow. Total time to sustainable: 1 year, 2 months.

Right now I have four ideas in-queue that I think would make good businesses but finding a co-founder is my first priority. If anyone reading this is in the Bay area and looking a project let me know.

EvilTrout
I worked on my project (a pretty large web game) for a year before we launched it. Money started coming in right away. We had coverage on wired.com which was a nice spike, but I only got confident enough to start withdrawing a regular salary after another 12 months.

So technically 24 months, which is longer than the other posts I'm seeing here so far.

ejs
Never at the rate I am going :-/
jnovek
Today was the first day of our first billing mo. with our first customer. Our second customer will place us clearly in the realm of "Ramen Profitability".

It took four ideas, a co-founder revolving door, one false start and copious amounts of luck to get here.

Altogether, 11 months so far. While working the day job. I'm constantly exhausted.

swombat
I didn't quit my job until I was ramen profitable and then some. However, the ramen profitability went away after a while. Things can grow as well as shrink. My second business is not yet ramen profitable.
axod
About a year, give or take.
gills
Not yet (+189 days).
SwellJoe
About 8 months. And another 6 months, or so, to one (modest) salary profitable (meaning: enough for one person to live normally, without money concerns). We're probably at two salary profitable today, though it's a bit weak for a Silicon Valley engineer salary, and my co-founder has a family and a mortgage (in the valley).

We were actually selling software within a month or two of starting the company, as we were starting from a mature Open Source project and so didn't have a ton of code to write, so we hit the ground running pretty fast.

markessien
It took me 3 days. I entered a market with products in the $10.000 range, and sold my product for $900. I had my first sale within 3 days (actually, it was the second, the first sale was the guy who gave me the idea in the first place {because he needed it}).

This was after about 4 months of work, though.

shafqat
I quit my job to work on NewsCred in July 08 (8 months ago). Hope to be Ramen profitable with 6 people in the next six months (we have a B2B side that is not apparent from our consumer website). Will definately post with details when that happens. It's tough, but no question one of the best decisions of my life.
aaronblohowiak
Six people? Wow! Are you stateside?
shafqat
We're pretty distributed. 2 people in Geneva (Switzerland), 1 in NYC, and 4 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. My cofounder just moved their from Sweden to start up our office there and take advantage of cost efficiencies.
aaronblohowiak
Wow! I am really interesting in learning more about your international startup experience.. especially in setting up an office in Bangladesh to take advantage of cost efficiencies. Perhaps that'd make for a good story to submit to HN =)
blakeb
Started doing web app development consulting to learn the ropes shortly out of college with my cofounders in Nov 03. Started the design for buildasign.com in July 04 as one of our hopeful projects to turn into a sustainable business (a product rather than service business is what we were aiming for). Soft launch and slowly increased advertising starting June 05. Got our first manufacturing garage space in Nov 05. Paid ourselves for the first time in January 06. Things went well from there.

So I was full time for 2 years before getting paid beyond a just-survivable amount from consulting and hosting.

patio11
So you quit your job to run your own company.

I did? News to my bosses. ;) I've had a day job for the entire duration.

I started being consistently ramen profitable about 28 months after starting. (Last October-ish.) In February I hit my next milestone, which was "sales > salary". I'm hoping to hit "profits > salary" sometime before the end of April.

I've only ever had one product. I've tried making two others in the interim, but they got put on the back burner for a variety of reasons. Someday.

Stuff of interest: I don't know what you find interesting, but my blog is in my profile if you want the whole story. If you want to skip to pretty graphs see http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats .