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Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?

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Re: Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?

#31

Post by wenbert »

tonyvt2005 wrote: post #29
wenbert wrote: post #27

for me, it would be number 2. I cant afford to lose the salary. Here in the Philippines, there are no YCombinators or Launchboxes (or i don't know one :P)... if there was funding, i would drop everything in a heartbeat and concentrate to work on my big "idea"... for now, this big-"idea" stays on the extra hours at home and on weekends... sometimes i wish that people in the US would fund startups here in the philippin…

That's an interesting one. Difficulty in finding funding overseas. I wonder if the YCs of the world will branch out internationally someday. I don't see why not.

Overseas funding would be great but YCs and similar companies would have to be careful though. I am not sure in other places, but here in Cebu(Philippines), everything is booming... Infrastructure is improving due to large international companies (EG: Lexmark, NEC, etc.) setting up in this small island. And like i said, everyone speaks english...

Re: Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?

#32

Post by markdc »

tonyvt2005 wrote: post #4
pragmatic wrote: post #2

I make a pretty good salary at my current job. I have a young son at home and I provide all the benefits. My salary could be replace, my benefits would be much harder to replace. So nights, weekends, lunchbreaks, etc, I'm writing and hacking away...

Yeah, benefits can be a big deal. I work for a small defense contractor and they're paying for me to go to grad school. There's certainly nothing wrong with taking the safer route when you have a family to provide for.

Agreed. I quit a good job at a major company to join a venture-funded startup in 2000...obviously my timing was terrible and the startup went under within a year. The result was devastating personally and financially. I'm just now to the point where I have enough savings to try again...but at the same time I've rebuilt my career. It is really, really hard to walk away from a good paycheck again, especially since the economy looks like recession in 2008. So I work on things on the weekends.

Re: Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?

#33

Post by markdc »

tonyvt2005 wrote: post #30
mosburger wrote: post #24

Put me into the "trapped in day job for pay and benefits" category. I've got two small kids now, and I've got to think of them first. I guess that means I'm in categories #1 and #2. Perhaps a little bit of #5, "waiting for that killer idea." If my idea was killer enough, maybe I would be less afraid of looking for investors. I don't want to turn this into a political discussion (it's one of the reasons I don't go to…

Good point. I think gov't provided healthcare would have a huge effect on small businesses. Let's go Obam.... ok wait, let's not get political :)

Or if we just had competition in health care. It's illegal in America to sell health care insurance across state lines, for example. It's also illegal for associations to buy group health care. One could imagine a competitive market where you could shop for insurance online nationwide, and where groups like Y Combinator or university alumni associations could offer insurance to members (getting the price benefits of scale that individuals can't get). That's John McCain's approach. U.S. tax policy is the reason health care is employer-provided-- that's what we need to fix, not expand the government's role in the system.

Re: Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?

#35

Post by vlad »

s3graham wrote: post #16

9. Failed at full-time (gave myself 6 months). For now, I'm back to enjoying a job + #8. Maybe I'll try again if I convince myself something's good enough to try for. Are you generating $500/day in value piddling around on your MacBook in Ruby? Are you generating orders of magnitude more than that?

You're supposed to fail.

Re: Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?

#36

Post by huhtenberg »

tonyvt2005 wrote: post #13
huhtenberg wrote: post #11

6 and 5 are closely related. The way it worked for me was to (a) generate and *polish* the idea; (1) make sure it is technically sound (2) not trivial, i.e. not easy to copy (3) maps well on business opportunities (4) does not have IP (patents, licenses, etc) problems (b) implement it about 80-90% through, prepare solid beta (c) release beta and see how it's does (d) if all goes well, evaluate the progress and estima…

Just curious - was a.2 something you felt like you HAD to achieve? There's tons of examples of copycat apps out there; some are just better executed than others.

(2) determines a level of a "competitive entry barrier", and as such it's really a part of (3).

The harder the idea is to copy, the more time you have for the app to mature. Any new idea needs real-world tweaking, e.g. the actual use of the app may end up being different from what you envisioned, some non-obvious features may be in a high-demand, unforeseen scalability or usability issues may surface, etc. The longer you have to address these issues without worrying about users leaving to the competitor the better.

Writing an actual copycat app is a different game altogether. I don't have an experience with it, but the common sense suggests that it's not worth doing unless there is a large, under-served market segment or all existing solutions really suck. Hoping to bite a piece out of established market with a couple of (flashy) features is not a very smart thing to do.

Re: Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?

#37

Post by johns »

Can't give up the salary (wife, house, etc). Luckily I've found an employer supportive of my startup (was originally a consulting customer) and has let me structure my day job to get more time than nights and weekends to work on it.

I went at it full-time for 6 months when I first launched and it didn't fail, I just ran out of money to sustain a salary. That was 18 months ago, I'm still solvent and quitting working at it full-time was probably the best thing to do for the long-term viability. My goal has always been to get going on as little resources as possible so that if it failed, it wouldn't be a huge disaster. So far, so good.

Re: Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?

#38

Post by bkrausz »

I'm not working full-time because of college. I've heard many arguments for/against it, but I do feel that a degree is a useful and worthwhile plan B in case you do need to go to a big company for a paycheck. So for now I hack away on weekends (and weekdays, and whenever I'm not working on homework) in hopes that when I do get out of college I won't necessarily need to cash in on that plan B. That, and if I dropped out of college my family would disown/dismember me :).

Re: Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?

#40

Post by procrastitron »

pragmatic wrote: post #2

I make a pretty good salary at my current job. I have a young son at home and I provide all the benefits. My salary could be replace, my benefits would be much harder to replace. So nights, weekends, lunchbreaks, etc, I'm writing and hacking away...

I don't know why I didn't think to mention this before, but there are HR outsourcing companies that will let you set up a co-employment agreement with them. Basically, these companies get tens of thousands of small businesses together, and then bargain with insurance companies as a group. This way they can get much better rates than if you tried to buy individual insurance.

So what you do is file your new business paperwork with the state, and then buy an HR contract with one of these companies. I think the largest one is Administaff, but my company recently switched from them to another one called TriNet, which is supposed to be cheaper.

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