I appreciate the comments, I can see things a little differently now. In my case she has some directionless (slacker) men in her extended family and I think her perception is that you either work hard full-time in a job or you are a slacker like them.

The most important issue here I realise is stability as we have a young family, mortgage etc and the salaried job makes everything easy to manage on a monthly basis.

I would readily give up the startup idea for my family, so in this equation, the lowest priority is the startup - but it still burns a hole in me night and day thinking about it and the potential.

I guess the easiest way to eliminate most of the unanswered questions is to chip away to a level of profit somewhere close to my salary in my spare time and only if that happens, revisit the idea of going full-time. Fortunately, it might prevent me from chasing a bad idea before its proven.

On a side note, I was not expecting such insightful feedback on a "software" issue like this - but its very much appreciated.