Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

First, have some savings and a plan to minimize burn rate if things get tough. More importantly, there needs to be a compelling answer to what you're accomplishing for your family, or what you as a family are accomplishing, by making the change away from your present comfortable arrangement.

And if you're serious about doing a startup, do consider moving to an area that will have what you need but is cheaper.

1. Found a business partner who bought into my vision for the company.

2. We BOTH sold our houses to get equity out for the business and also so we were not stuck with a large mortgage. We then rented less expensive homes.

3. Business partner stayed working at his job and he split his income between our families 50/50. We considered our value equal, so I worked the startup full-time and he worked his job full time. His income was not enough to cover all of our living expenses, but it certainly extended our runway.

4. We met every Saturday for about 4 hours to work together.

5. This lasted for 3 years until we finally make the company profitable.

6. Business partner then left his job and joined company full time.

FWIW, I always tried to start something on the side but never had enough time to fully bring it fruition. When you go "all-in" like we did, you have a lot more pressure to make it work (which is good). Most of my side projects were always kind of "half-alive".

I've done exactly what you're trying to do. Let me give you the playbook.

In preparation, I've done years of research in the field I'm working on (APIs, Integrations, developer experience). So you need a clear advantage.

Next, choose a topic that you're thrilled to be working on for many years. Doing this means you have to eat a lot of glass. It's crazy.

Commitment. Be ready to work through weekends and nights. You will feel bad because you won't have time for kids and wife. Your wife must 100% support your endeavour. It will be tough. Don't kill the relationship.

You need co-founders. Don't try this alone, it sucks. Build a small team around you. I found 3 amazing co-founders, a COO, a marketing genius, and a hacker. You can use tools like YC cofounder match. A lot of people will be a bad match. Meet a lot of them and try out things.

Build whatever you can to get one single customer, that's a person who pays you money. For us, this was enterprise support from the first customer at $2k/month. This changed everything.

How do you do this? Fuck everything. Stop building. Talk to potential buyers. Get someone to give you money for what you're doing. No money, no value. Whatever it is, get some MRR.

The last one was my biggest issue. I kept building because I loved building so much. But I was just coding, not creating Business value. If you're able to ship any kind of MVP with your co-founders, you're able to get some MRR, that will give you angels, and finally you can raise a seed.

All of this can be done on the side. Keep your job as long as possible. Get that one customer, get the angels and a SAFE for 6-12 months and then double down on that first customer, improve the tool, get a second customer maybe and raise the SEED.

It's possible. It's going to be tough. But you can do it. If you need my help, I can mentor and give you the right intros. Best of luck.