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

If you are accustomed to a 40-hour workweek, just skip the startup until your kids are grown. You likely won't be able to do that at a startup.

If you can push to 50-55 hours a week by e.g. working a few evenings a week, you may be able to make it work through a combination of contracting, outsourcing, and grit. (If you do not do a B2C startup. Those are harder!) There's no hard formula, but the basic idea is you can likely earn enough to survive through contracting for ~50% of the hours in a year. Relentlessly triage your MVP and launch quickly to paying customers. Then either reinvest the proceeds into labor in lower-cost countries to iterate on the product, or take a hit to your billable time to do so yourself.

If you get to $X,000 MRR, remember you can likely sell the business for a decent amount of money and start again from a more solid base.

Why you choose Wyoming and not Nevada for example for your LLC?

You may consider and intermediate step of shifting to consulting where you can capture more value and free up more time.

Also partnering with existing projects.

Perhaps there is a start-up in the realm of helping people like yourself do what you want to do.

But you may want to ask yourself why. If it’s just that you are itching to gamble with your families financial future, perhaps back off.

If you feel you have an idea worth pursuing, go for it.

The idea that most successful startups are created by people in their early twenties is basically a myth. The median age according to the various bits of research I've seen over the years is somewhere around 35 - 45. And yes, that includes unicorns. [1][2][3][4]

I've never seen any research on the topic but I have a strong suspicion that if you looked at the failure rate of startups founded by 20 years old it would be vastly higher than that of startups founded by 40 year olds, as 40 year olds are likely to be able to invest their own funds in the early stages, have industry expertise and contacts, and are more likely to have learned the interpersonal skills to manage relationships with co-founders, customers, funders etc. They also probably know the market that they are going into so have a much smaller space to search for product market fit than a 20 year old with less knowledge. There are exceptions of course.

But the honest reality is that if you don't have a year or two's cushion where you can continue to pay the bills while pursuing your startup you probably shouldn't do it if you have kids and a family, unless your partner is willing and able to pick up the slack financially. That's assuming you go for the classical silicon valley "let's dedicate every waking hour to building our tinder clone for chinchillas that will revolutionise fuzzball breeding" tech-bro method of working on a startup. It might be saner to take a slower approach and bootstrap to begin with while seeing if you can work part time.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/27/super-founders-median-age-of... [2] https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes... [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1220545/founder-age-star... [4] https://startups.co.uk/news/average-age-of-startup-founder/

> I have a well paying job now, and I am pretty sure I would throw my marriage into chaos if I told my wife I was leaving my job to pursue a start up.

This is a conversation you should have with your spouse. Many spouses go back to school or pursue a financially risky entrepreneurial path. The other spouse supports the family. I've also seen this blow up, as the fiancee/spouse that supported the partner gets dumped after shortly after success... If you do this, I strongly encourage you to offer your spouse a generous postnuptial agreement (i.e. more than CA family law defaults to.)