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

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

#51

Post by yashg »

>how do I continue my current standard of living for my family while working on a startup? You can't

You either have to save up for a year's worth of expenses and also downgrade the lifestyle and make sacrifices or convince a VC and raise a decent seed round but that too will come with conditions and you will probably not be able to pay yourself your market salary.

Entrepreneurship is hard. Very hard. Survivorship bias ensures that we only hear about successful ones where everything worked out. But as you already know, that happens in a tiny number of cases and that too after a lot of hardships.

Starting up something as a side hustle is the only viable option. You will have to put in after work hours and sacrifice some family time to fulfill your dream if you don't want to upset your marriage and lifestyle.

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

#52

Post by goatherders »

If you want to maintain your current standard of living and start a business you need customers, investors, or savings. If you want to start any business, startup or lawncare and all points in between, you need customers, investors or savings.

So start by solving that problem.

P.S. the "90% of startups fail" is inaccurate and moronic. It gives no context on the type of business or the outcome. Starting a 1 million dollar / year lifestyle business is incredibly simple (not easy, but simple). Starting a fifty billion dollar pharma company is incredible difficult. Anyone saying "well I want to start the latter, not the former!" has never had a 1 million / year lifestyle business.

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

#53

Post by s1k3 »

I just did this. I had 2 very important things that helped me succeed in starting.

1. A supportive wife 2. A wife that can pay the bills while I take 0 salary to build something.

Without those 2 things I wouldn’t have been able to start.

As I’m sure you realize now that you have a wife and a child your free time is limited and at bad times. So if you want to actually be able to accomplish something you have to pull real time away from something else.

Your choices are 1. Your family 2. Your job.

You could try going part time and asking if your wife is willing to do an outsized portion of the family work but that goes back to (1) being critical. First and foremost you need a wife that will support you.

I know this probably isn’t helpful but it adds a datapoint for you.

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

#54

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

I'm currently going through this process with a very supportive spouse. I quit my job last year and have been burning through my savings to develop prototypes. This is obviously very stressful, especially as, in this economy, it's no longer guaranteed that if I give up I could find a job in my area that pays the bills.

She accepts the risks and wants to see me try to follow my dreams rather than give up. We've moved back in with my parents to save money and help with childcare.

Once I can secure some investment, it should get easier -- at least financially, if not in terms of work hours. That's also difficult these days but we'll see how it goes.

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

#55

Post by erex78 »

I'm the founder of a venture-backed company in my 30s with two young kids under five. My co-founder is also in the same boat. A few points:

1. My wife works in a well paying field (nothing crazy, but comfortable), and we were financially stable enough to be able to live without my salary for a couple years.

2. We were very customer focused from day one, even before we incorporated. We signed up several customers (using LOIs) with just a deck, before we wrote any software.

3. We discovered a very clearly defined problem, a payer and clear willingness to pay.

4. I don't work like I used to. I feel much wiser about how I spend my time rather than brute forcing it with hours. Because of the two kids, I effectively work 9-5, M-F. I don't work weekends. During 9-5 though, I am dialed-in (I don't spend time reading the news or checking instagram). I delegate much more aggressively than I used to. I don't think I'm actually outputting much less than I used to, I'm just more efficient and focus on the more important things.

5. Venture - this is what it's for. There is still a bunch of venture out there for seed/pre-seed. We raised money early on and that allowed us to take small salaries (and hire folks to delegate things to).

100% it's definitely not as easy to start up in this stage of life, but it's also not impossible. Happy to connect with folks who want to connect (commiserate?) about this situation.

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

#56

Post by ageitgey »

I started my company in my late 30s, married with a kid. I'm sure everyone has a different strategy based on their circumstances, but this is what has worked for me:

1. Saved money through normal tech job and paid off obligations where possible, so expenses weren't too high and savings were good. So the risk of trying something on my own was manageable.

2. Left my tech job, but did consulting first for a few years. Easy to go back to a normal job if consulting doesn't work. Used savings to get through the initial period of figuring out how to do consulting. Really nice to have some kind of side income in this period - like teaching online courses or whatever fits into your skillset.

3. Built up money through consulting, but also built up contacts and partners in the target industry.

4. Pivoted from consulting over to the start-up in the same industry when the timing was right. Could have fallen back on consulting if the company failed. The nice part about consulting is you can split your time between paid work and your own work in whatever ratio you want, so you aren't ever jumping off a financial ledge.

It's not like this was some master plan. But it is how it worked out for me and we were thankfully relatively stable at each step.

As far as the company itself, my advice would be (1) Find really good partners you trust that are good at what you aren't good at. Being good at programming is maybe 20% of starting a tech company. (2) Don't up-end your life to start a solo side-hustle SaaS where you are convincing people to pay you $19.00 - find a real industry with real money to spend. Or alternately, keep a side hustle as a side job until it actually gets some traction.

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

#57

Post by Kalanos »

lpolovets wrote: post #41

VC here. If you're building a bootstrapped business, then starting as a side project and building up revenue until you can go full time is probably the way to go. If you're going the venture-backed route, I think there's a misconception that there's no salary or minimal salary at early stages when you're funded, but this is not true. Most founders take a reasonable salary, where reasonably is defined more by your per…

yeah dude just "take" a salary from your seed round. lmao

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

#58

Post by aliljet »

ageitgey wrote: post #56

I started my company in my late 30s, married with a kid. I'm sure everyone has a different strategy based on their circumstances, but this is what has worked for me: 1. Saved money through normal tech job and paid off obligations where possible, so expenses weren't too high and savings were good. So the risk of trying something on my own was manageable. 2. Left my tech job, but did consulting first for a few years. E…

I'm really curious, where did you find your consulting opportunities? And what did you precisely consult on?

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

#59

Post by higeorge13 »

lpolovets wrote: post #41

VC here. If you're building a bootstrapped business, then starting as a side project and building up revenue until you can go full time is probably the way to go. If you're going the venture-backed route, I think there's a misconception that there's no salary or minimal salary at early stages when you're funded, but this is not true. Most founders take a reasonable salary, where reasonably is defined more by your per…

Are we even allowed to do side projects? What if our employer claims ownership or even conflicts of interest with what we are building? How will i even present it into hn or producthunt with my name and all my credentials while i am still working somewhere else? Any employer would fire us on the spot if they found out, wouldn’t they?

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

#60

Post by tmcneal »

I feel compelled to provide a counter-point to all of the "you can't" comments here.

It's possible. I started a company with my co-founder three years ago. We both were mid-thirties with kids when we started. We've since went through YC, raised a seed-round, and the company has been growing ever since.

What worked for me:

- I saved up money and drew from that while we were getting the company off the ground. My co-founder and I went close to a year without a salary. Having a spouse that works also helps.

- Having a relatively low cost-of-living helped. It never felt like we were reducing our quality of life, although this was in the middle of the pandemic so we weren't able to go on vacations etc even if we wanted to.

Building a company is a lot of work, but that's true regardless if it you're married with children or not. I think parents have the advantage of being forced to be efficient with their time. It did require a lot of work after-hours coding to get things off the ground, but I probably would've been coding on something anyway.

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