Echoing what many have mentioned in this thread. Read your employment agreement for mentions of Intellectual Property, inventors clause, etc. I work full-time and I am launching a side business, but I have a licensing agreement in place with my employer that clearly states my ownership of my businesses IP in exchange for a free license of the product. There is a lot of grey area in employment agreements. Even if there isn't anything that is clearly stated (from your understanding) that would cause issues, it is up to debate in the court of law. The best plan of action is to speak with a lawyer. It took me six months and multiple revisions to my licensing agreement before it was signed, but I can now sleep better at night and launch my business!
Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?
71–80 of 193 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh strange, can’t reproduce. Are you on mobile or desktop? Browser?
Same for me on Chrome. There's a 'mousewheel' event listener attached to the window that is calling preventDefault()
This absolutely infuriates me to the point where I'm struggling to remain civil. My blood instantly began boiling after reading that sentence.
Why the @#$% does some web designer think it's a good idea to disable mousewheel scrolling?! What does this accomplish? What feature do you gain? What was the goal?
I just can't for the life of me grok what would be going through someone's brain when they decide "Hey, you know what would make this page better? Disabling scrolling with your mouse wheel!"
EDIT: Maybe the intent was to do something else, like implementing smooth scrolling in JavaScript, and it's not working properly. But if that's the case, the answer is that web devs need to stop trying to mess with scrolling. Implementations rarely work correctly in every browser and it just ruins the UX. Just stop messing with scrolling!
Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?
#73I built bonsai.io/websolr.com while working at Twitter in 2010. I left in 2012, keeping a promise to a co-founder that I'd leave if we hit $1M ARR.
There were definitely a couple months of pager/ops overload where I hit 100hr workweeks and multiple hundreds of pagers per week. Hypervisor bugs meant that some tasks were hard to automate, and that automation would stochastically fail, so I stayed up til 4am watching the logs and correcting issues, then went back into the office at 10am.
Basically, it was a reasonable hedging strategy against either company's failure, but given both succeeded, I lost a good chunk of what I would have made if I was "all in" on either. Plus, it was about as miserable as it sounds, though I learned a ton.
Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?
#74Bootstrapped https://artcall.org and trying to gain traction on https://ezzl.art while employed full time elsewhere.
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Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?
#75We had a different turn of events in our case. Me and my co-founder we were working on the startup, while on our full-time jobs, and we got some grants from governments to allow us to quit and persuit it full time. This was 4 years ago and we are still going strong with sales and grants. Never underestimate the opportunities for free money! Governments, councils, schemes, all have projections, agentas and budgets and if your startup aligns with them you can get 10k to 150k usd just by writing a few proposals..
Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?
#76Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even the grand old red state I'm working in doesn't allow these claims but it sure didn't stop the company I work for from asking me to agree to them. After I moved and started working. I made a small stink about it but they were adamant and eventually I caved. These laws are important .
Yep, I now ask to see these agreements before signing a job offer after making a similar mistake at a previous company.
I did too, and they made verbal promises that they went back on. Next time I'll make sure to ask in an on-the-record communications medium.
Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?
#78I built Artpip ( https://artpip.com ) whilst working fulltime. Spent the odd weeknight and some weekends developing it over the course of a few months, then the same again when I added the pro mode once I realised it could actually make me some money. Not sure you could classify it as a startup, but it makes me a few hundred dollars per month. I'd actually love to grow it more but I'm not sure what the best direction…
How about galleries of NASA pics, national parks, and other themes besides art?
Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same for me on Chrome. There's a 'mousewheel' event listener attached to the window that is calling preventDefault()
This absolutely infuriates me to the point where I'm struggling to remain civil. My blood instantly began boiling after reading that sentence. Why the @#$% does some web designer think it's a good idea to disable mousewheel scrolling?! What does this accomplish? What feature do you gain? What was the goal? I just can't for the life of me grok what would be going through someone's brain when they decide "Hey, you know…
In this case it's a bug, as I'm not trying to 'disable' the mouse, but track scrolling and then make the menu 'stick' to the header when the user scrolls down the page. A common design pattern which increases usability quite a bit.
Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?
#80Might not be your typical answer, but I launched an ecommerce store that’s been profitable since the first month. At first I targeted solo devs without much digital design skills, but it turns out that blank sketchpads are very useful to designers and design agencies as well. It’s done well enough where I continue to run out of each batch of inventory and it’s turned a small profit as I continue to order large and la…
I love these. You should make whiteboard magnets!
That’s an interesting idea! I’ll look in to that