Tell HN: I quit my job to bootstrap my startup by myself.

Hi Chris. I must say you are doing exactly what I did 5 years back. I would like to share my experience with you.

Starting up my own company was my dream since my college days but I worked at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. as a SAP ABAP Developer for 2 years after completing my graduation. It was a nice job with smart people around me and interesting work to do, not to forget the high salary SAP consultants get. It was good for 2 years but then I felt my job was dragging me away from my dream. The whole corporate environment started to suck. It was time to leave the shores and get into the deep sea.

I had some good ideas related to web. My plan was to work together with two of my college friends and they both agreed on this thing. I never asked them to quit their jobs but to just work on weekends. One of them backed out at last moment.

Lesson learned - Don't make your plans dependent on others. Make sure you alone can handle it if required.

Its getting long so I will just point out other suggestions I have for you:

1. Have a fail back strategy for everything.

2. Get a co-founder but make sure he is as committed to your idea as you are. Some of them will try to tell you how you need to do something else to get some quick money and then use that for your project. Those people are interested in earning money and not in your idea.

3. Spend as little cash as possible.

4. Focus on only one project - your dream project - as early as possible. Don't waste your time on random projects for learning or to earn quick cash.

5. Choose a technology platform early and stick with it.

6. Release your Version 1.0 as early as possible.

7. Don't work 24/7/365. Its not good in long run. Give 8-12 hours per day and take a day off on Sundays. Important thing is to be consistent.

8. Network with people who can help you - other hackers, designer, entrepreneurs, etc. Use your weekends for this.

9. Stay away from your friends or family members who discourage you. Stay away from their negative energy. However you positive or sure you may be it will affect you. Good thing will be to have a limited contact with such people.

10. Don't get involved in love relationships unless your girlfriend is supportive.

Best of luck.

I joined!

Good luck! I am doing the same, but did not quit my day job.

I think what @anujkk meant was not to get distracted with side projects, learning projects etc. I think you can spend a little time on learning projects and that justifies the ROI in terms of time but I think he is primarily talking about the other distracting smaller projects.

Everything you do in your startup should lead to your primary goal and not distract you from that. Small, related projects or activities that can somehow help you make progress in your main startup idea isn't a bad thing.

What happens is that if someone joins your startup and he is more interested in earning money than the implementation of idea itself, he will try to convince you that your idea is going nowhere and you should put it on hold for sometime, may be for a year or two and do some other things like consultancy, web design etc. to earn money. Thing is that you will get dragged into other unrelated activities(that you don't enjoy doing) and will waste the time you should be utilizing to work on your primary project. In this case, your and your partner's objective aren't aligned. Such people tend to switch projects too often as they want quick money. You will find yourself switching from project A to project B to project C and it all will be a big mess. After a year or two you will realize that you have failed in all of those, your partner isn't interested in continuing anymore and you are at same place where you started, all alone.

Thats why point no. 2 - Get a cofounder who is "genuinely interested" in your idea. Make sure his goals and your goals are aligned. For example,

"I want to develop an X web application that will help Y users in doing Z tasks and which will be profitable after 18 months of launch"

and

"I want to develop software to earn some money as early as possible. It can be your idea or any other depending on the availability of clients and opportunity."

aren't goals that are aligned with each other.

Edit: A related link - http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jump...