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

OP is not experienced. OP has no idea what he's doing. It will take him 1 year to realize the idea he chose sucks. 1 year to panic and freelance while he figures out what he's doing next, then 2 years to reach profitability.

I agree with some of the other's comments that time is the most valuable asset. Be productive! Also: 1) Most of the advice that you find online is not really applicable. I like the stuff that Sam Altman (yes, ycombinator) puts out because it most mirrors what I've experienced. 2) You need to do it yourself. Whatever it is. Just do it. 3) Funding is a game. Here on the east coast investors pretty much only fund the growth stage of a company after you have real traction and are virtually guaranteed some kind of success. You will need to fund your startup out of your own pocket until then! This is what they call "friends and family" because you will be hitting them up for money, favors, meals, places to stay, etc. 4) The tech is the easy part, as that is what you know. Marketing and selling is the hard part, as that is what you likely don't know. It is the part you should try to get help with if you can, but finding someone that knows what their doing is tough, so you can be sidetracked quite a bit. 5) The "do things that don't scale" is completely true. Reaching out one-on-one has been the most successful way to engage potential customers, even though it is very time and labor intensive.

TLDR - Sort out your finances first, startups are extremely stress inducing and even now with our startup at the point of break even, £1m ARR and 100% growth predicted for next financial year, I still currently earn less than I need to live but with the promise of a strong exit in the next 3-4 years if we hit our targets.

Previously I contracted as a full stack developer bringing in other developers on projects as and when the project timescales wouldn't have been achievable with just me. Running a software consultancy alone, dealing with all of the usual rigmarole of a business and performing proper client outreach was stressful, but financially and personally very rewarding (especially when you close a big deal completely on your own).

In order to get involved in my current startup, which at the outset was comprised of a designer, biz dev (CEO) and myself as CTO I had to cut off ties with my previous clients and dedicate all of my available time to the new startup. I had leveraged myself quite a bit running the previous consultancy as billings were growing year on year, so my VAT/Corporation tax accounts were generally paid out of job fees towards the end of the year rather than set aside throughout the year, leaving me in a negative cash flow position when stopping work for existing clients. Luckily there were some ongoing payments that didn't require development resource, so the small admin time required to invoice and chase up was all that was required, and enabled me to setup payment arrangements with HMRC to settle these liabilities over a period of time, out of this cashflow. Setting up these arrangements was very stressful, and I would strongly advise anyone coming into a startup to fully evaluate their financial situation before committing even if the opportunity seems huge.

Initial salaries in the new start-up were minimal (£1000 p/m approx), and it took a solid three years, extremely long working days, almost unmanageable personal stress and around £0.5m of funding before we're now up to an above average average salary, £1m ARR, a team of 15 and strong growth projected for the coming year.

Success is a subjective term and occasionally I have to refocus to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but with enough grit, luck and determination, it’s possible to tip the balance to a point where success is now more likely than not.

A 100k salary is roughly 400 per 8 hour day worked.

I agree with you about the complexity of a mvp. It indeed may vary. However a mvp is about testing an hypothesis, not building a simple version of a product.

Maybe an mvp for a complex product is just a landing page explaining features with a buy button, built in under 2 hours using optimizely.

Again, it depends on the hypothesis. So, in this way, I differ with you when you say getting out a mvp asap doesn't make sense. Because validating you hypothesis is what you want to make as fast as possible. But then, launching as fast as possible doesn't imply necessarily launching fast.