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Neither.
You are burned out. Rest / have some fun and fall in love. When an idea hits you run with it. If nothing inspires you and you get bored with rest go find a job.
Otherwise, get a job.
If you're serious about it, there is another option. You can move to Europe or Asia and live cheap while working on your business. I make ~$1,000 a month doing freelance work 30 hours a month. The rest of the time I spend working on my project ideas. My living expenses are ~$400 and I spend another $100-200 on project ideas.
- Travel as soon as possible. The world will speak to you in ways a computer never can.
- If you don't go back to work right away, you may be looked at as less reliable to HR department and hiring managers later.
- If you do choose not to go back to work right away, you need to consider the opportunity cost of not getting involved with someone else's start-up right away.
- If you and your girlfriend want to move to a city, be sure she has an opportunity there to save the relationship in the case your your entrepreneurial interests don't pan out.
All of the options you suggested will likely lead to to future burn out if you don't move to a larger company. Find a job you kinda like and stay put for awhile go gain experience and relationships, and place a rock in your resume. Then you can pursue your dreams if you're able to save more or dramatically reduce cost of living relative to a city.
Before you write a line of code for #2, have a clear strategy for app distribution, user acquisition, free to paid conversion. It won’t just happen because you have a great product. Just remember to make a million a year, you need 10,000 people paying you $10 a month.
Yeah. I spent the better part of two years building something I really wanted to build that I thought people would really want to buy. Turned out I was wrong. If you're burning through your own savings you need to find out as early as possible if there actually is any real demand for your product.
But you probably don't want to do it alone. It's better to own 10% of something, then 100% of nothing. Also validate your ideas before doing actual work. For example do a kick-starter, or a signup-page, pitch the idea to possible customers.
With your runway, #2 sounds great, but try and find a different idea. Productivity apps and yelp like services are a dime a dozen. You'll probably waste 1-2 years, and expect to waste 3-5 more before you can replace your main source of income. Entrepreneurship is risky and developing software is the easy part.
Yea, I'm not sure they are great ideas. My reasoning for the productivity app is because I want to build something I personally need and I haven't found a good solution. The yelp-like app is because I know I want to work with small businesses. I just don't know exactly how yet. So, you're right. I need to spend more time on my ideas. Thanks!
If you're serious about it, there is another option. You can move to Europe or Asia and live cheap while working on your business. I make ~$1,000 a month doing freelance work 30 hours a month. The rest of the time I spend working on my project ideas. My living expenses are ~$400 and I spend another $100-200 on project ideas.
I live in a dirt-cheap country and I find it hard to believe that you can survive on $400/month. Do you take a trip back home? Do you factor in the price of your laptop/phone? Does this include clothes/medical expenses? Also, what country are you living in?
Similar boat to you. Had the exact same question in my life. I decided for a totally different option, lets call it option #4: #4 Take an "easy" programming job and use your spare time on nights/weekends to build a software business. I chose this option because I wasn't willing to risk my savings. Plain and simple. I want to retire some day, and blowing 60k for a ~5% chance at making a profitable business wasn't wort…
A caveat: I took an "easy" job but it turned out it was the job from Hell. Because "easy" job was surrounded by people that didn't know what they were doing. So a truly easy job might be one where everyone is overqualified and you only need to do your own thing (as opposed to expending a lot of energy explaining to people how to do the right thing, all the time, because they just don't get it).