And since you mentioned basecamp, here's what employee #1 of 37 Signals thinks of the topic: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1764-the-natural-evolution-fr...I could not agree more fully with this. This bit here really sums it all up in my opinion:
But the idea that you need to quit your job to do it right is misguided. If you quit your job, you shift everything. You don’t gain time, you lose it. You put a shot clock on your business. You box yourself into a position where you have to profit immediately or the whole thing goes under. You’ve got to make it work now or give up forever.*
Hanging on to your day job gives you a longer period of time to build your idea. It lets you give a sustained effort over time. There’s no get rich quick option. You build it slowly, one day at a time.
Yes, you need to find time to do both your side business and your normal gig. But there’s always enough time if you spend it right. Instead of watching TV or playing Grand Theft Auto, work on your idea. Instead of going to bed at 10, go to bed at 11.
That's exactly it... at Fogbeam Labs we're not trying to get rich quickly, but as long as the founders have dayjobs and we keep our burn rate low, we have - essentially - an indefinitely long runway. This gives us more time to experiment, learn, and iterate, without having to panic in fear of having to shut the whole thing down, if the first few experiments don't go the way we expected.
I keep thinking about what pg said in the "How not to die" essay:
http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup. It certainly describes what happened in Viaweb. We avoided dying till we got rich.
and
When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they've become demoralized. You rarely hear of a startup that's working around the clock doing deals and pumping out new features, and dies because they can't pay their bills and their ISP unplugs their server.
That's our mindset... as long as we can keep going, we will eventually "break through" and make it.