Did you leave your job and then start a business, or was it a side project that evolved into a full-time gig?
Ask HN: How did you start your business?
1–10 of 145 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#2I have had some side projects make a little bit of money, but never enough to make any sort of headway toward replacing my full-time job.
My current effort is also a side business while I continue to work my FT job. It is definitely detrimental to the business to continue to devote 40+ hours per week to something else, but I need to feed my family (if I was young and single with no other financial obligations, I would totally just quit the day job and live on canned meat and potatoes) :/
My advice - if you're young, take your financial risks now. It only gets harder to do later :)
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#3I left my job. Or, more accurately, the startup I was doing contract work for went under, and I decided not to look for another contract afterwards. I worked on a few projects before starting my business, Indie Hackers, which I grew to just under $6k/mo in revenue (in 8 months) before joining Stripe.
I've done interviews with close to 300 founders. Recently, I added a sortable, filterable directory that can help answer questions like yours. For example, you can filter to only show businesses started as a side project: https://www.indiehackers.com/products?commitment=side-projec.... I'm still working on improving the accuracy, but it's coming along.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#4Employee => academia (PhD in AI) => open source (Gensim) => ML freelancing (radimrehurek.com) => ML consulting company (rare-technologies.com) => ML products (pii-tools.com, scaletext.ai).
Looking back, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to jump right into full-time products, skipping the intermediate budding steps. Is it a burden to understand the whole process, from accounting, legal, HR, management, ops, sales, support? Better to outsource them right away?
It's definitely true that all that ancillary stuff is a distraction, a (stressful) time sink. Especially when you're just starting out and clueless, like I was. Bootstrapping slows you down. On the other hand, it felt kinda natural, but took many years. Not the standard (?) SV path of rapid growth.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#5I left my job, took some time out, and then started building my business (https://dependabot.com).
Financially, it's been tough - after 10 months Dependabot makes $2,100 a month (although that's now growing quite fast). I know I'm the kind of personality that couldn't have started it at the same time as working a full time job, though - I need to be really focussed on one thing at a time.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#6Never had a job in my life. I helped friends at real estate offices fix their IT problems while a student. People kept asking me for more and more stuff. Server setup, hosting, data analysis, websites, etc. Also got many referrals that expanded the business.
Eventually I just focused on the most fun and profitable projects only, while passing the rest on to freelancers or friends.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#7Had a noncommercial side project (website) while working at university and later as a freelancer. It became more popular and got some press coverage, then VCs came knocking on my door. I gave in to the 3rd offer. Business model was tacked-on later (it was the year 2000), but was logical and works to this day.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#8I had been a recruiter for several years, starting off out of college with a ~200 person international firm for a couple years and then a founding member of a small boutique recruiting firm for about seven years. I eventually figured out that I wasn't getting any value from my partner, so I started my own recruiting firm.
During my recruiting career I was always writing/editing resumes and giving job search advice to my candidates, but the job search advice was always awkward because I had "skin in the game" (potential fees). I never became comfortable with that process.
On the side I started a resume writing and career consulting business, and I decided a couple years ago to make that my full-time focus. At first I wasn't sure if I'd be able to maintain my income from recruiting (wife and 2 kids in an expensive area, special needs kids), but so far it looks like I'm on schedule to actually earn more.
Beyond the compensation, I find the work far more fulfilling. I'm working more hours than I used to, but I feel I'm actually helping people much more effectively. Hearing stories about how a resume and advice got someone their dream job feels good, and I'm also writing for some interesting people both in and out of tech.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#9Employee => academia (PhD in AI) => open source (Gensim) => ML freelancing (radimrehurek.com) => ML consulting company (rare-technologies.com) => ML products (pii-tools.com, scaletext.ai). Looking back, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to jump right into full-time products, skipping the intermediate budding steps. Is it a burden to understand the whole process, from accounting, legal, HR, management, ops, s…
How old were you when quoting as an employee and started the PhD ?
Was it hard financially ?
I’m asuming you had a degree already.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#10I left my job. Or, more accurately, the startup I was doing contract work for went under, and I decided not to look for another contract afterwards. I worked on a few projects before starting my business, Indie Hackers, which I grew to just under $6k/mo in revenue (in 8 months) before joining Stripe. I've done interviews with close to 300 founders. Recently, I added a sortable, filterable directory that can help answ…
Wow, Courtland, I had no idea Indie Hackers was only 8 months old when Stripe acquired it - you already seemed super established to me. Congrats on achieving that in such a short space of time.