Update - we are now now working full-time, in our own office!
Most startups seem to embrace 60-80 hour weeks, you keep reading about them and begin to believe that this is normal. After 12 hour marathon coding sessions ‘typical entrepreneurs’ walk 10 metres from desk to bed and collapse in their shared accommodations. Living in such lean conditions makes those crucial first months of business far cheaper. This work ethic and minimial living costs maximises the runway before the seed money runs out.
Paul Graham is one of my favourite bloggers, and in his essay entitled The Other Road Ahead he paints a clear picture of how lean a start-up can be, stating “You can literally launch your product as three guys sitting in the living room of an apartment, and a server collocated at an ISP. We did.”
No matter how much I’d love to take the lean ramen noodle approach it’s simply not practical for me. I’m a father of two, a husband of one, and an employee. I’ve got a beautiful family with young children, a modest house with a mortgage, and a full-time job to pay the bills. In short, I have a standard existence that I imagine many of my readers share. Living off noodles in a cheap apartment with my co-founders is not the only way that start-ups are built. I’ve taken an alternative route that involves just as much hard graft (harder maybe?) and allows me to remain employed full-time. The food sure is better!
I simply have to fit Gridspy into the gaps between the hours at work outside of the home and the start-up and the time put into fatherhood and being an available partner. It is a compromise position that I have had to maintain for the last year until Gridspy was ready. Along with the mandatory overtime, maintaining a full-time job limits my flexibility. I cannot travel to meet potential clients as easily or pick up the phone to talk to them. It markedly slows down progress. However, without the job there would possibly be no Gridspy, or less so than there is now, as there would be no base to develop from.
Despite my full-time commitments I still consistently work on Gridspy. As I mentioned in Selling the Dream I spend four evenings a week working on Gridspy (3-4 hours each one) plus all of Sunday and manage to make a lot of progress. Sometimes I spend my four hours on a blog entry, sometimes on some firmware or a little bit of Django code. Lately I have been creating the setup process for new users. There is a ton of documentation to do on our website - it all takes so much time.
Since my baseline existence is ‘family-man’ and a full-time job, I have had to pace myself with Gridspy. If I am not careful I will burn myself or my loved ones out (and trust me, we’ve been close at times) so I have to be the tortoise rather than the hare. At least doing a small chunk every night gives me a lot of time to think through technology decisions and plan my development.
Of course Gridspy is all that I want to work on and all that I can think about. This creates constant tension/wishful thinking in wanting to jump in both feet first and get everything up and running now, yesterday! It doesn’t help that this fully dedicated full-time start-up founder is also a widely published expectation.
But there are no savings to live off, and even though the almost three year old in my life would like to live on noodles for a bit, I don’t think I could for long. Being employed isn’t as simple as just turning up to my ‘day job’ and punching keys so I can pay the bills. I want, need, to be a ‘good employee.’ It takes conscious effort to honour my commitment to my employer. I remind myself everyday to focus on the work I do for them and to leave Gridspy at home. I’m sure you can see how after a long day at the office and after the chaos of the early evening with the kids, it can take a while to get down to the business of Gridspy. Sometimes all I want to do is grab a beer and turn on the TV.
I like my job, it has loads of benefits. Not least that I can afford to buy beer and have nice dinners and provide my wife and children with all the comforts of home. I have been given some great introductions to potential business partners through my well connected colleagues. I’ve had a group of fellow engineers to discuss my ideas with and sound out my features. Plus I’ve had lots of free coffee and idle banter around the water cooler to enjoy. The benefits of a stable routine and a reliable injection of cash into our bank account each month are not to be frittered away lightly.
But when it comes to developing my own gig, it is a chicken and egg problem. The sooner I take the leap and go fulltime with Gridspy, the sooner we can complete the features that are preventing us from doing a large scale release. But the moment I take that leap, the clock (and the bank account) starts ticking down. I have an extremely short runway and I worry that I could scuttle this opportunity before it has had a chance to take off.
Reading entrepreneurial blogs such as Paul Graham’s can make you think that you have to go fulltime or give up. I am taking an alternative route. By creating Gridspy part-time I have been able to give it the time and breathing room required to succeed. I’m starting to think that this path is the most courageous since it requires serious commitment to devote all your free time to your startup. In the end, I am sure that my compromises will pay off.
Please let me know in the comments what your own situation is like.
- Have you taken the leap yet, or is it not a viable option?
- When is the right time to do it?
- Are you also battling to keep it part-time even though you really want to take it fulltime?
Further reading:
I'm with you as a part-time tech entrepreneur. Juggling the demands of a startup with paid work and family life is extremely challenging and requires strict discipline and the efficient allocation of time. We actually talk quite a bit about this issue (along with everything else related to writing code and doing startups) on our podcast - Techzing. Check it out if you get a chance.
Thanks for the link Jason. I really look forward to checking out your podcast. I don't find the time allocation side of things as hard as the sheer exhaustion and the inherent conflict of trying to do a good job while thinking only about the start-up.
Plus, it kills me a little whenever I think of how fast I would be able to go if it was possible to take Gridspy full-time.
Thanks for this post, it's very encouraging. I'm in a very similar situation, 2 kids, one wife and a mortgage. I find my biggest problem is coming home after work and after dinner, bathing the kids and getting them to bed, I rarely have the time or energy to focus on what I'm doing on the side. How do you manage to get 3-4 hours a night and still sleep? I'm lucky if I get 1 or 2.
Thanks for the comment Chris.
I stay sane though a combination of a great schedule and a flexible employer and supportive wife.
I get up at 6:15 am when my little 2yr old alarm clock comes in. Kids + myself fed and ready to go by 7:30 - on the bicycle for a 15 minute ride. Work from 8 to 4:30 (or 8:30 to 5 if I get in late). Kids often asleep by 7 or 8 pm, my wife often takes care of them while I start working at 6:30.
Passion for Gridspy then takes over as I figure out what I most want to do and try to keep at it until I get too tired to work. It helps to deal with the difficult stuff on Sunday during the day when I can put a full day in.
I remember that it is okay to take it slow once in a while and give myself permission to take a night off when it is all too much. Slow and steady effort is key. When I take a night off, or on Saturday, I put Gridspy totally out of my mind.
I'm looking forward to when I can go fulltime. I think that it will actually mean less effort and stress overall once I can totally focus on my passion.
If I wasn't enthusiastic about Gridspy, I couldn't do it.
Great write-up--succinct, anecdotal, and no sugar coating. This is precisely reason not everyone is cut out to start a company. Thanks again!
Tom, as others have said - great post. I'm also in the same situation. Great day job, wife, 2 kids and a cat. My routine is very similar to yours.
I have to be very focused and spend my time wisely. I want to give quality time to my wife and kids but also spend enough time on the business where it doesn't languish.
Every day, I create a list of short achievable tasks. I really can't afford to spend weeks on an issue. A few hours at most.
Just wanted to drop by and say I thoroughly enjoyed your post. Keep them coming.
I appreciate your situation and am rooting for you.
I pulled the plug on my full-time job in '07 and spent that entire year consulting. Both my kids were in highschool at the time. In '08 I had a mix of part-time consulting and working on my own thing. It's hard to find the right balance of consulting and working on a project. If the consulting is too demanding, there's not much brain power left when you switch gears.
In '09 a lot of my consulting prospects dried up so I spent the majority of the year working on my own thing. Despite the amount of planning and thought I put into my projects there is always a way for something to go wrong. So, having a full year to work on my project did not get me in a position to turn it into a product. Things take time and it's hard to know whether sharing the work and the payoff with other developers will be worth it.
I am back to consulting part time (and really needing the income) while trying to figure out how to stop failing. I might feel more in control of my destiny
because I'm not beholden to a single employer but now I must always keep my eye on the cash flow and seek out work as needed. It can get a little intense.
When kids get to highschool, and then college, they don't really want to spend that much time with their parents. In addition, my wife is working really hard to launch a non-profit of her own so I honestly have a lot of time in my day/week to devote to developing my product ideas. Finding the right trajectory is harder than any design or programming problem I have ever had.
Time and effort estimates are almost always way too optimistic. Even having the time to focus all your efforts on your project might not be enough when
external forces cause you to have to change your plan. It might be easier / safer to reduce hours at work than to quit unless your product launch is
imminent (within a couple months) or you are getting investors.
I wish the best of luck to you!
Keep it up. You’re in the same boat as I, and so I’m pulling for you.
Obviously, committed co-founders can help spread the load. Also, people in our position need a realistic plan. For me, that means launch small and iterate. You never know when you might attract some financing to help grease the wheels. Best of luck.
I really enjoy your story and did a note here in chinese. I think everyone has dream, all roads lead to Rome.
It is indeed a difficult dilemma, and one that I've gone through myself, and am currently going through again - perhaps somewhat easier the second time around, with some savings salted away though.
I think it's important to have some criteria planned, too. Some measure by which you can decide it's time to switch modes (or not) and even if you decide to revise those criteria, or toss them out entirely, it still keeps you tied in to reality.
This is not just for knowing when you can quit your day job, either. There are plenty of points in the whole process where things can be discouraging, and it can be heartening to have some independent statistics you can point at in those slow times to remind yourself that you really are progressing towards your goals.
Good luck :-)