Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#151

Post by LyndsySimon » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 1:25 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #13

buf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put it in your contract before you get employed. If starting a company while employed, reach out to your employer saying you're building company X which does Y as a side project and you need a document stating no IP ownership.

No employer I have ever worked for would even consider modifying this language in their agreement. They are going to have a standard boilerplate and if you try to negotiate or modify it they will tell you “sign it unmodified or GTFO.” Ask me how I know :-)

This is not my experience, including early in my career when I worked for FedEx.

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#152

Post by fizx » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 1:33 AM UTC

shdh wrote: post #141

fizx wrote: post #73

I 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 th…

Any insightful takeaways from "watching the logs" and "correcting issues" in terms of what you would do differently?

If you aren't automatically rolling instances frequently, you will inevitably have some machines that were theoretically cattle but in practice are pets. (This is much easier today with k8s/mesos)

More generally, when you claim in system design that you have invariants, if you aren't using automation to enforce your invariants, they will inevitably be bypassed to your detriment by eager and/or lazy engineers. You will find this out at the worst possible time.

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#153

Post by lee101 » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 1:34 AM UTC

I built a high frequency cryptocurrency forecasting system https://bitbank.nz and few games in my spare time http://www.wordsmashing.com http://bigmultiplayerchess.com http://multiplicationmaster.com

hasn't made that much money but allowed me to get paid more at work and tipped our income over the edge so we could get a mortgage on our first house which was nice :) great decision and learning experience building products from the ground up and exciting/grounding interacting with customers who always like to push the limits of your product :)

I have noticed others who have a lot of job experience coding but not the business/product experience can find it difficult to prioritise things from a users point of view and or build reusable/extendable systems by anticipating how things are going to change in future.

Even if it fails terribly i think its a good learning experience and can work out in your favour... Word Smashing made some money from ads but $0 from listing on the android app store :D -$20 on app store ads actually...

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#154

Post by hluska » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 1:49 AM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #72

neetdavid wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

What do you possibly gain from this kind of rage? It's rude and makes for an extremely low quality comment.

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#155

Post by dsizemore » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 1:56 AM UTC

Unfortunately it's not profitable and I'm not even sure I'd call it a "startup" but I do have a day job and enjoy building web apps in my free time. My most recent project is http://www.famsnap.com. I built it after becoming frustrated with the process of finding a photographer to take family photos while we were on vacation.

I have around 300 members currently but it has been slow growth. Every photographer I've told loves the idea but there's no place to really promote as posting on Facebook groups or forums is seen as spam and deleted. So I'll keep on growing slowly I guess using Instagram to contact photographers and see where I am in a few years.

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#156

Post by ndnxhs » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 2:09 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #13

buf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put it in your contract before you get employed. If starting a company while employed, reach out to your employer saying you're building company X which does Y as a side project and you need a document stating no IP ownership.

No employer I have ever worked for would even consider modifying this language in their agreement. They are going to have a standard boilerplate and if you try to negotiate or modify it they will tell you “sign it unmodified or GTFO.” Ask me how I know :-)

I know people who have had this part of their agreement removed

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#157

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:04 AM UTC

ssalka wrote: post #41

overcast wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"asserted ownership of everything I build, at work or away from work, using my own equipment, on my own time—it doesn't matter" That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Assuming you're not stealing technology, or doing it on their time or machines, there is no way a court would uphold that. If I build a house, or rebuild a car in my off time, they own that too? Corporations don't own your entire life.

Sadly this is fairly commonplace in IP contracts. Though some companies provide potential hires with an option to list "own inventions" wherein he/she can list projects they may continue to develop in their own time and retain ownership of. Granted, all entries therein are subject to approval by the company - obviously they won't let you pursue a project that is actually in competition with their business.

One of the many things that attracted me to my current company is that the employment contract specifically states that you own your stuff that you do on your own time, that doesn’t compete with the company, as long as you use your own equipment. Not really a problem for me since I have no creative ideas to start a business outside of generic cloud consulting and screening potential employees for other companies.

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#158

Post by canadapups » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

javiramos wrote: post #147

canadapups wrote: post #26

I have a finance career, plus I built CanadaPups.com. Very little maintenance and costs, but lots of fun to tinker and improve it as a hobby. Just letting it grow on its own as I'm kinda out of ideas of how to kick it up a notch - suggestions welcome!. https://canadapups.com

How did you get the first few customers to achieve enough critical mass to make website successful?

I needed traffic from the buy-side and sell-side.

On the sell side (breeders), I can just google for new customers! Many dog breeders have their own websites. I search for dog breeders and then contact them through their website (either their webform or their published emails).

On the buy-side (people looking for pets), I pay for google ads on certain keyword searches. As my website became more relevant, the cost of the ads dropped significantly and I started getting more organic searches. Getting buy-side is more difficult for me. Once you find your new pet, you don't need to visit my website anymore, so customer retention is bad... something I need to work on.

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#159

Post by dazhbog » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:31 AM UTC

shdh wrote: post #145

dazhbog wrote: post #75

We 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…

Can you post some sources to this information?

Dont have any guide tbh, it is all luck and prercistence. Just to give you an idea, we apply to multiple grants every 1-2 weeks from websites like younoodle, f6s and we keep an spreadsheet with all the deadlines of each grant (that might have their own website). All this while doing a hardware product and running the baby/startup.

Talking with people, the first barrier we see is that people think they can't get or don't deserve grants. They give excuses like, "Oh I never been to country X", "I'm not a resident there", "It's just an idea", etc etc.

Most grants will ask you to go to country X, incorporate there in some cases (to attract talent), or get involved and help the ecosystem of that region. For others you just submit a proposal with milestones and you have check, presentations and writeups (and ultimately you do the things you promised).

Some examples of grants are, startupInsertXCountry (e.g. StartupChile, StartupPeru, Startup Puerto Rico - P18), LaunchKC (Kansas City), EU H2020 (hard) but also H2020 sub-programs that got H2020 funding for a cause and pass it on to startups as a challenge (robotics challenges, Big-data challenges), HotDesQ (AUS), and many many many more countries that want to be like Silicon Valey)

Hope this helps!

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#160

Post by illteratedang » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:57 AM UTC

I've done that. I run a service which let's you sleep with your coworkers.

Basically it uses a GPS and those who wish to sleep around can optin.

It will cure sexual harassment issues at workplace. Pm me, if u want to get laid with your coworker :)