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Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?

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Re: Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?

#81

Post by sgberlin »

fergie wrote: post #52

I quit my job to start my own company last January. Its been fairly successful so far. For somebody like me, and probably a lot of HN readers, its _actually_ a fairly low risk proposition because qualified, experienced software engineers are so sought after. Whatever you are doing, you will always be able to pick up a $1000-$1500 a day gig when you need to bootstrap your actual project. My old boss has contacted me a…

Yes! I will probably quit my pretty well-paid job at the end of the year to (slow) travel and work on some SaaS ideas. Basically the worst case is that I have to call it quits and get a another job (if I'm unlucky with less pay). So if you don't have a huge family and/or literally no savings the risk is super low.

Re: Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?

#82

Post by yazan94 »

jasonkester wrote: post #23

The biggest change was how much more free time I had. When you're building a Nights and Weekends side project, you get used to stealing whatever free hours you can to work on the product. But you also necessarily build things so that they don't take up much of your time every day. If they did, it would interfere with your day job and that just wouldn't work. So when you remove the day job, you find that suddenly you…

Could you elaborate on how you got your business to be successful?

Re: Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?

#83

Post by aregsarkissian »

daliwali wrote: post #59
ramadis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the whole point of an MVP is to validate the hypotesis you make about your users. In your case for example, do you know who your users are? Are they entrepreneurs? Current software developers? Anyhow, who is going to use your service? I'm not trying here to undermine your project since it indeed sounds pretty awesome, but to reinstate why the whole mvp movement has a reason to be.

For marketing-tech, sure it's a great model, but getting out an MVP as fast as possible doesn't always make sense. Sometimes it takes an order of magnitude more effort to get to "minimum" or "viable" depending on the product. On the contrary, a lot of developer's side projects just feel like things that any reasonably skilled developer could build given a few days. The question of finding customers, is exactly the sa…

Getting an MVP out as fast as possible doesn't contradict an MVP that takes an order of magnitude more effort to build. It's just that the ASAP for the latter case is whatever amount of time that it takes to build it.

Re: Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?

#84

Post by wirelessest »

issa wrote: post #58
cheez wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you catch lightning in a bottle, you'll need 4 years.

I think this is just a disagreement over the term "startup". For something like a new restaurant, or a mom and pop store to be profitable, it might take many years. But most actual startups are going to validate an idea quickly and either make money or not in a short amount of time.

You have examples? Every startup I've been with has been many years to profitability and the common names follow that pattern as well.

Some get traction, or maybe growth early on, but actual startups don't seem to "make money in a short amount of time"

Re: Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?

#85

Post by ryandrake »

Grustaf wrote: post #39

For me, and probably for most, it's not a matter of quitting your job in order to work on your "successful" startup - if it were already successful then there'd be no issue at all. Rather it's about quitting while the startup is just beginning to look reasonably good, _in order_ to make it a success. Since I've been working as a mobile developer, and also management consultant (my other career), it's always been extr…

Your (and other) replies seem to assume that the startup is something you're already doing on the side, while employed full time doing something else. Is this really that common?? Most, if not all places I've worked assert IP ownership over anything you do while employed, even on your own time. That's 100% what keeps me from moonlighting and/or starting my own thing on nights and weekends, and keeps me from contributing/consulting for friends who want help with their idea. How do you have any confidence that your startup is really yours when you could get sued by a former employer the day you quit to grow it full-time?

Re: Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?

#86

Post by UK-AL »

cheez wrote: post #70
jasonkester wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's just being realistic. It took me more like 8 years to build up to a respectable salary. After the first 4 years I could pay rent and buy groceries but not much more.

You're one of my heroes, keep up the good work :)

This implies he must have had backing from other sources. Not encouraging for people who don't have that.

Re: Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?

#87

Post by geetfun »

welanes wrote: post #61

> What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup? 1. Time became my most valuable asset. Everything was filtered through the lens of "does this save me time?" and so I optimized everything: The gym (worked out at home), shopping (got delivered), dating (used fleshl...joking! :). In the words of Joel Spolsky, "Every day that we spent not improving our products was a wasted day". 2. I worked har…

Echo the same thoughts myself.

Like they say, the best time to start a startup was in 2014. The second best time is now.

For me, there was also some fear as the revenue was quite new. Although it was significant, the thought has never and still hasn't left my mind that one day it could be gone.

It's also made me quite conservative in how I use the cash flow to grow the company. I'm not of the camp where I pour every dollar back into the company but rather I should take it out and invest in other things.

Re: Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?

#88

Post by hesdeadjim »

I've had two very different experiences starting a company.

The first time I was two years out of school with $12k in the bank, had a partner with a ton of experience, and a decent idea. We crunched for six months, launched, failed, and then tried to pivot. I ran out of cash a few months before the iPhone launched and had I had a longer runway we could have ported our app to the iPhone and potentially seen success.

A year ago and nine years later than that attempt, I've started a small video game company with another friend (justintimegame.com). Despite my life situation being more complicated and expensive to maintain, the prior nine years success combined with my wife's income basically lets me try and fail until I get sick of it instead of when the money would run out. Obviously I'm aiming for success, but the massively reduced stress from barely worrying about money let's me be much more open to experimentation while also being resilient to failure.

I don't regret starting and failing my first company however. It set me up for having a higher risk threshold and an interest in startups that ended up working out quite well for me.

Re: Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?

#89

Post by cjr »

I started my screenshot Saas product, Urlbox (https://urlbox.io) as a side project back in 2013. There were times I did think about shutting it down as the amount of time spent on it initially compared to the revenue growth was just too depressing! A whole 3.5 years later it had grown just enough that I could begin to take it more seriously and actually support myself full-time working on it.

As with everything there are pros and cons. The pros are obviously that you get to spend your time doing something you enjoy (hopefully), and can work whenever and wherever you feel like (this can also be a con!). The cons are that you will always be worrying about stuff like churn, whether servers will go down whilst you're away on holiday, how you're going to grow enough to support a family etc etc.

The long, slow Saas ramp of death really is a thing, and there are no silver bullets in terms of growth/marketing - just many small things that all contribute. I also always used to think 'if only I could just get to $x MRR then everything would be so much better and I'd be much more comfortable and relaxed', but when you do eventually break through that barrier you realise you're just more worried about how you are going to achieve the next one, so it's kinda never ending!

I also agree with other posts here that if you're already a decent developer in a good market, then what is the worst that can happen really? Try doing some fearsetting. I'm sure you could always find another job if your thing doesn't work out, but you do need to give these things time. I also failed a bunch of times with other startup ideas, one of which was also YC backed.

Re: Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?

#90

Post by zha »

yazan94 wrote: post #82
jasonkester wrote: post #23

The biggest change was how much more free time I had. When you're building a Nights and Weekends side project, you get used to stealing whatever free hours you can to work on the product. But you also necessarily build things so that they don't take up much of your time every day. If they did, it would interfere with your day job and that just wouldn't work. So when you remove the day job, you find that suddenly you…

Could you elaborate on how you got your business to be successful?

It is covered at http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles
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