Sep 1 will be the 1 year anniversary of my decision to go out on my own. In the last 10 weeks I have missed rent payments, missed insurance and had it cancelled, sweated 2 dollar bus rides, not eaten sometimes because I didn't want to spend money on food.
At times, I have regretted my decision to leave a comfortable life, doubted, cried, bargained, been depressed and thought things the former me could have never imagined me thinking.
I've learned a lot, but not enough, and while part of me is deeply worried, the bright spots are really bright and I am hopeful that I'll emerge stronger. I've separated some real friends from fake friends, learned where I'm strong and where I'm weak, realized how amazing my girlfriend is, and grown up a lot.
I'm still depressed and unconvinced I'll be net better off. And this might sound awful, but part of me is glad when I see that other people have pains and doubts, because it makes me imagine that I'm not alone in the struggle, that the lack of immediate success doesn't mean I'm incompetent.
Overall though, I feel like the chips are up for me right now. I've been in a spot once or twice in the past where I felt pretty desperate and depressed like you have mentioned. There's few things worse than professional failure with conveniently ill-timed personal trials happing simultaneously.
Luckily, this time around I've prepared a little more for the hard times that might soon come due to professional trials. Also, my past hardships have helped me prepare better mentally, knowing that I've pulled myself out of slumps before and that I will do it again when the chips are down.
I guess my point is, keep at it and remember that you're going to make something amazing. I always tell myself that I'm here to "create epic shit". It helps restore my ambition and makes me giggle a little. Maybe I'll have to say it more often if and when I take the startup full-time...
Be careful in your long term thinking with your girlfriend. I've seen a lot of guys work like crazy while their girlfriend doesn't like it, and the guy thinks, "Well, if this pays off she'll understand." In my experience - not true.
People have different temperaments, and if she dislikes risk or wants a more regular amount of time and affection, that's unlikely to change and money doesn't fix the problems there. The best couples for entrepreneurship are ones where both guy and girl are excited by the process of working hard, striving for the impossible, putting in long hours, and can handle the emotional burden and strife that comes with that. If your girlfriend doesn't have the temperament and you do, money likely won't solve that later.
I was dealing with a pretty high maintenance client though, and dealt with scope creep and other consulting mainstays. If managed correctly this can be a good way to go, just be careful.
I'm just saying that the equation becomes a lot more complex at this point.
People worry about moonlighting when you have a full-time job but if you are running a startup they usually understand you can make time for them when you need it.
Consulting is not without its downsides. It doesn't scale up (well, it scales up with added in-house or out-sourced staff, and the associated project management and administration), and it tends to be price-competitive if you're working in a "mainstream" area of expertise.
Consulting can be a very effective distraction to your concentration, too.
Two or three days on customer work, and some focus on billing and proposals and related administration, and then several hours or more of spooling back up to speed on whatever part of the product or debug that you had been working on when the call came in. Then you realize your week is shot.
Put another way, TANSTAAFL.
Make sure you aggregate the financial and focus costs in your estimates. And make sure you can also efficiently encapsulate and snapshot whatever you were doing when the customer work arrives; hone your process skills around in-swapping and out-swapping projects.
Consider providing an end-project summary - not just for the customer's benefit and for the marketing, but also so that you can in-swap the project more quickly if there's additional associated work. The same approach can work for a summary and status for whatever you were doing on your project when the customer call arrives, though that can be a couple of cryptic paragraphs in a text file.
We're launching in 2-4 weeks, and the nature of the project is such that if it doesn't take off immediately then it may never take off. Talk about a fire under your ass!
That said, I'm loving it. I'm actually living in India at the moment, working from my laptop. Its dirt cheap over here, and during the breaks I take I get to experience India. And did I mention its cheap? $5/day food, $6/day housing, $5/day miscellaneous.
On the "up" side, I have never had a real, structured, paying job so I have never made real money. Just some scraps that my blog makes each month. So being broke and (trying to) live within my means has become natural.
I like your second point here. I still live basically like a college student which makes it easy to live off very little. Heck, you should see some of the shitholes I've slept in in India to save $5 for the night.
I made great money one summer working as a management consultant, but hated the work. The perks were great though: first-class international plane flights, no per diem and lots of extravagant meals, blahblahblah.
None of that stuff means anything though. I'm not an ounce happier for sleeping in a nice room, or having an extravagant meal. Those things fade away as soon as they're done.
But I've never been happier working for something that I care about and that's mine.
You don't need to be very specific though if you don't want to reveal secrets, don't get me wrong.
Its a videochat website, which if I described you'd immediately compare to Chatroulette. If we don't achieve critical mass early, everyone will leave.
To a degree it is like Chatroulette, though there are different types of rooms and a security mechanism that actually keeps perverts off (you sign in using FB connect, though we never reveal to anyone who you are. This is just to track you so we can block you permanently if reported. And no, you can't create a new FB account and get back on; you have to have 20+ friends to sign in).
If you show up and noone is on the site, you're going to leave and never come back. Thus, need a critical mass to keep it going.
Based on some calculations I've done, to keep a minimum of 50 people on the site at all times we'll need 15k visitors per day.
There are a few other features that I'd be thrilled to go on and on about, but I hope I answered your question. If you're curious and have more questions, you can find my email address in my profile.
TLDR: I think if you're clever, there's no reason your could not get traction later on even if it fails to be a ground-breaking success right after launch.
I'm broke and in a startup, been at it 1 month to the day, planning a launch in early Sept. I actually need to be code complete for the 28th of Aug as I'm going to Burning Man.
No I don't think it's going to be perfect and there are a lot more features I'd like to see going to launch but since I don't have a budget for a national media campaign I doubt it will make a difference and at least I will be getting feedback.
You're still going to be in debt whether you think about it or not. If you stopped now would it improve the situation? Probably not. So get ready to launch, launch it, talk your book, make some cash. You can still build those features with some paying customers. Stop coding, start cold calling. Thats what I will be doing come Sept whether it be potential clients for the startup or potential clients for contract work.
I get by, by not thinking about it. Spend 2 hours thinking about the worst possible outcome, you blow all your money/credit/etc, and have zero income. Then think about what you will do. Now you have a plan. Never think about it again until the day comes that you need to put your plan in action. Then execute your plan.
Also tickets were on sale from Jan 2010, he could easily have bought them back then.
Good luck!
I mean, things have been much worse. At its worst, I was personally on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars of company debit, and making even less money than I am now. failure is something that I've faced before and that I'll probably face again. But, the thing is, I've never had any real financial responsibilities. If failed, really, my creditors would have been the only people who were hurt. Hell, even now, yeah, I'm living with someone, but she's another bay area nerd and doesn't need my money.
I personally would feel very different about taking the risks I take if others were depending on me. Would I do it anyhow? I don't know. but I'd think much harder about it. (and yeah, this is part of why I've avoided taking on those responsibilities.)
On the other hand, I do know other very successful entrepreneurs who made their money while supporting families. But most of those took the lower-risk 'productize your consulting business' route.
I've had to shut-down two start-up's--the lead developer lost his mind on the first (1996) and the money ran dry on the other (2003). In each case, I went and got a job. It sucked working for some numb-nuts with a limp handshake, but needed the money. And I had two puppies and a girlfriend trying to get out of college on the first blow-up, which was no fun. Luck of the draw. I'm launching my third literally this week.
Unlike the previous occasions, I'm better educated. And I'm a lot less emotional. This is business. I have a standard that stipulates the following--if v 1.0 is over 1/3 late, you're probably throwing good money after bad, so time to ask where the execution bottle necks are. At 2/3 late, time to "come to Jesus" on your start-up and start asking some very tough questions, like how did this get so borked and how can it be rescued. And at 100% over-run, don't think about it, just bail because you've screwed something up so bad that no amount of talk or analysis is going to rescue you. Get a job, build back up your finances and your marriage, and look for another opportunity.
And reflect on why you are in a start-up. Are you trying to change the world or have a cool work-place?
Start-up's are not for everyone, and certainly should be pursued carefully by those married and with financial obligations.
If you're putting your family through hell, you have to ask yourself how long is reasonable to do that. Ruining the finances of your family, or worst case getting turfed out of your home, is unacceptable. And when you have kids, it's no longer about your dreams and desires--it's about providing. You had your chance, it's gone, so suck it up and get ready to do what our own Fathers did--work for the Man and hope for the next generation.
I know that sounds harsh. But I've been on the other other side and watching your home get yanked away is not something your children should ever, ever experience.
its just 7 months into building this stuff and its all our first time so i think its par for the course. Certainly excited to launch soon.
The downside is my fellow students who went straight to jobs after college lead much cushier lives than I do and sometimes make me envious, but I expect that to change given a few more years.
So will probably be back working full time with contract combo and will just hire out simple bits of code / skip sleep for my start up
Use this amazing skill that you now have. Get a job in Manhattan, make 200K a year for a couple of years and then try again.
If your worried that this will make you fat and lazy then theres a way to make sure this doesnt happen: 1. Never listen to what your boss says but be cordial as you would be with someone you met on the street. 2. Do whatever is best for the system and for sales of the system. 3. Say no to office politics in all its forms.
If you follow the above 3 rules (ie no brown nosing whatsoever) then you'll see that, even in a corporate environment, the only reason they'll keep you there is because you know what your doing.
I decided to do a startup (sneffel.com) over the summer instead of finding an internship, I was hoping it'd be profitable by the end of the summer. I tried selling to basic users/consumers with no real customer in mind. I really thought it would work at the time. As you might expect, it didn't happen. Now it all appears obviously silly. In any case, I'm broke. my rent contract ends in a few days, and I need roughly 1000gbp for rent and deposit on a new place. A few friends have been buying me groceries and I've been trying to do freelance work (scriptlance, elance, odesk), but haven't had much luck there either!
Debit, I think, has a ongoing negative effect... you are committed to paying $x a month, even after you've spent the original loan on your initial bad idea. Now you've gotta come up with operating cash for the business, for yourself, /and/ the cash to make a payment.
I see debit as more of a "you have this one shot... if you fail, bankruptcy" kind of thing. Which can be okay for some things... but it's not how I work. See, usually I end up doing the wrong thing first. After that, I have a better idea of what the right thing is... but if I took out a loan and spent it on the wrong thing? now I'm stuck with a pretty big debit payment. Only spending the cash I can get my hands on through the fruits of my own labour puts an upper bound on how much money I can spend on bad ideas.
Now, for me, I ended up just spending a while contracting and paying off the debit that way... if I hadn't been an idiot to start with, I'd be a year ahead now.
1- launching is always later than envisaged 2- you won't strike it rich on day 1 of release 3- doing something else on the side might actually make you more productive on your own project
Just don't crash and burn yourself. I'm a contractor and I work after hours. I rake a very decent hourly rate and I work my own hours.
Your profile: "http://____.com to be notified of our launch in the next month or so"
I'll pass.
If mainly feels like its going fast because I was accustomed spending what I want and not seeing my bank account drop.
Now that I don't have anything coming in thats not the case. The impact of what I spend is much more visible now.
how much of 150k were you saving annually?
Before that at NG I was part of a team developing firmware for gas detectors.
If I don't have income from my startup by next fall, I'll probably be doing consulting or getting a job, or at least seriously looking for one.
Most people can live comfortably in the US for under $2k/month all in. So in theory you should be able to save something like 4 years worth of runway with a single year's contracting.
In practice, you just convince yourself that it takes $10k/month to survive and as a result burn yourself into the ground 5x faster than everybody else.
it's incredibly tempting to spend all the revenue on myself. the business won't grow if i do that, though. it's hard.
That said, i have to think very hard about every purchase, because i have zero disposable income.