Persisting as a solo founder

Here's my understanding. YMMV. Moonlighting: working side job/s for other entities while you are employed full time by one entity.

The full-time employment entity is your own company (if you are the founder) or your full-time employer and there could be other companies or individuals to whom you work for part-time (1 day a week, adhoc days/hours, weekends etc) and you are paid for that work.

You have two things to consider:

1. Make sure it is legal (for example if you are on certain types of work-permit visa in some countries it might be illegal to work for anyone other than the work visa sponsor).

2. Make sure you don't have conflict in your employment contract clauses (many full-time employment contracts have clauses that prevent you from working for others even for part-time without explicit permission from the full-time employer).

Usually if you ask your full-time employer, they may permit you to do one-off consultations to other companies (and get paid for it) if they think it would not take your focus away from your FTE work and if there is no conflict of interest or potential to reveal trade-secrets (example: if that other company is a competitor etc).

Been indie 10+ years (aged 23-34) and can definitely say that — once it works out — the autonomy and independence make it an absolute dream lifestyle.

Some pointers and observations I've learned along the way.

1. The hardest part of persisting is the emotional game. Improve your motivation by doing things in a way that even a failure of your primary business goal still leaves you in a better position career/skill-wise than when you started. Also: figure out how to separate your identity from your business, otherwise every tiny failure or criticism will sap your energy.

2. For many — maybe most — products within reach of a solo founder, marketing will take up at least as much time as development. Unlike programming, marketing is shrouded in something not unlike the fog of war in RTS games. It is highly exploratory and experimental in nature. But dealing with this uncertainty carries its own intellectual appeal, one that you can learn to embrace — or even enjoy.

3. Outsource as much as can. If some work can be done for less than your hourly rate as a freelancer, then, overall you're more efficient to code for $$$ then pay someone to handle that part of your business.

4. The technical skills that are most useful to a solo founder are more to do with system design than programming languages and frameworks. You should focus on things like data integrity, uptime, redundancy, error-tracking, rapid response to production issues, integration testing, etc. rather than which React.js state library is better.

5. Get to know other solo-founders. I formed a monthly meetup with about ten other people in a similar boat in my town and these sessions acted both as a support network and as a way to get feedback on my (sometimes harebrained) ideas.

I've a lot more to say on this topic and I go into way more depth in the screencasts I post over at https://www.semicolonandsons.com/

Sales can definitely feel like that. Without more context on your market, decision maker personas etc. the one piece of advise that I can give confidently is this:

Start with Senior Sales Leadership. Ideally someone with experience in your target market.

Reach out to a few individuals, in your network or on LinkedIn or similar. Ask them for advice, see the type of advice they provide. If you like them, ask them to recommend someone – the hope is they recommend themselves.

It’s often part of being a “engineer founder”. You can go your whole career having the market side taken care of by your employer and end up overconfident about the business side.

Yes, very true. When you read marketing books, it seems very obvious. But trying to actually decide pricing, naming, positioning etc is a different story.