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

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

#171

Post by Schwolop »

With a founding team of six for a hardware startup, we couldn't all be paid without going bust, so the best thing was for most of us to keep jobs and accept the reduced speed of development. I've been working one or two evenings a week for 4 years, totalling 1500+ hours, which is close enough to a full-time year now.

As the software guy, I also found I spent much of the rest of the week subconsciously thinking through issues and solutions anyway, so by the time I did get that six or so hours to code I was pretty damn productive.

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

#172

Post by sticazzi »

jepper wrote: post #20

Not really a startup in the sense of a VC backed multi million dollar company but three working friends and me have bootstrapped a fitness websites with science based health advice, mostly free, to basically the largest fitness related website in the Netherlands. Currently employing people, which i think still sounds insane for a hobby project. https://www.fit.nl . 700.000 pageviews a month. App, 2 books, system for…

I like your design.

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

#173

Post by ramblerman »

NullPrefix wrote: post #148
jepper wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I' m not in the US, so no crazy salaries on both sides. The average doctor probably makes more but the best programmer makes way more than the best doctor. However with long hours, night shifts, pressure etc you have to enjoy what you do or burn out early.

>However with long hours, night shifts, pressure etc you have to enjoy what you do or burn out early Is this about the doctor or the programmer?

In the Netherlands I wouldn't expect any night shifts, or long hours as a programmer.

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

#174

Post by afpx »

bootloop wrote: post #114
polote wrote: post #67

That's what I do currently, I'm a full time product manager in a normal company, and I'm also working as a CTO at a startup, we are 3. Two people are working full time, and I only work part time (about 30h per week). I do that, because I like doing multilple things at the same time. But I think it is a very difficult life. I can do that because I have no social life and everything is optimized so that I can work all…

"Very tired all the time" - Where I come from (EU) this is the reason why it's not allowed to work two jobs (>40h) if the employer doesn't approve.

In the US, often employment agreements come with clauses that prevent working other jobs, and sometimes even preventing any out-of-work activities that negatively affect job performance.

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

#175

Post by antivirusco »

Doing this will not affect your software in anyway and you will still receive the full protection of the software. For any other assistance, contact their tech support number and get your issue solved immediately. More Info- https://www.antivirusconsulting.com

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

#176

Post by SimianLogic2 »

xcubic wrote: post #170
SimianLogic2 wrote: post #129

I didn't build one from scratch, but I recently purchased https://introcave.com for low 6 figures. Though my background is more full stack, my current day job is mostly front end. Most of the product/ux/ui work is done before things hit my desk (agency work), so I really enjoy being able to run something on the side where I'm making those decisions. It's profitable month-to-month, but until it recoups the purchase pr…

May I ask how did you know the website was for sale?

There are brokerages. I read about the codetree sale on HN a few years back (just google “codetree sale”) and signed up for the FEInternational list.

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

#178

Post by joepour »

My brother and I built TinyTracker(https://tinytracker.co) after getting frustrated with Jira. We're not charging yet but we have a handful of businesses happily using it who (I hope) will come on as fully-paying customers once we get out of beta.

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

#179

Post by Random_Person »

deedubaya wrote: post #37

I've got two cash flow positive side-projects while maintaining full-time employment, having a life, wife, and kid. BreezyPDF - https://breezypdf.com - Dead simple PDF generation from URLs. Comes with a rails middleware so all you have to do is add .pdf to the end of a URL to download a PDF of that URL. HOALife - https://hoalife.com - A CC&R Inspection and Enforcement tool for property managers.

Damn, I spent all night last night trying to get jspdf to work for me and gave up. Breezy looks like exactly what I needed! Serendipity.

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

#180

Post by j45 »

kk58 wrote: post #52
jepper wrote: post #20

Not really a startup in the sense of a VC backed multi million dollar company but three working friends and me have bootstrapped a fitness websites with science based health advice, mostly free, to basically the largest fitness related website in the Netherlands. Currently employing people, which i think still sounds insane for a hobby project. https://www.fit.nl . 700.000 pageviews a month. App, 2 books, system for…

What inspired a doctor to code? I assume that must have an inspiring story

Medical students are often the best students from many other faculties or programs in their undergrad that end up in 1 program.

An example of this is Bioware, a gaming company was started by doctors.

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