I started Complice (https://complice.co/) 2.5 years ago while in university, with the goal of making enough money by graduation that I didn't have to get a job. I succeeded at that, and have now grown it to about twice that, and it continues to grow, mostly via word of mouth and a few communities.

I mostly work on it one day a week, when I have a super maker schedule day and code for like 14h straight. The other days of the week I answer support emails and sometimes write blog posts. Total time these days is about 20h/week, and if I want to it can easily be 4h or less.

I've written a bit about my experience getting to here: - http://blog.complice.co/post/129788685472/complice-goals-ach... - http://blog.complice.co/post/130460454477/complice-at-2-year... -http://blog.complice.co/post/139686741757/my-complice-origin...

In some senses it worked fairly smoothly for me, but I'm not assuming it's easy. Some basic advice: (the posts above elaborate on some of this) - do things that don't scale - charge people from the beginning: ideally get 10 people to literally send you cash for their first month's subscription before you do much work--message friends directly rather than setting up a huge sales site - then gradually automate it with software, - (before you get monthly payments running on your app, you can run them with moonclerk (which uses stripe, so it's a seamless transition))

By following these principles, you know that at each step of the way, you're building something that people will pay for, because you have people paying for it. This also forces anyone you talk to for advice to take you more seriously.

Feel free to hit me up on twitter @Malcolm_Ocean with questions or just to connect :)