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Comment by jon_dahl | Hacker News Reader

Without turning this into "37signals vs. Y Combinator", let's just say there are pros and cons to each approach.

One of the cons of contracting is can be really hard to divide your attention in a startup. If there is any possible way you can devote 100% of your attention to a startup, then by all means, do it. I'm 10x more productive when I put 100% of my time into a startup instead of 50%. 10x, not 2x. Just my experience.

On the other hand, contracting is a great backup plan. It kept Zencoder alive in the early days, and we still do some video-related consulting work to reduce our burn and compliment our encoding service.

There's no points for effort, only for execution.

Well said. Mind if I use that? :)

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Contracting is very distracting. But it's distracting in a different way than a full-time job. And I think it's game-changing for lean startups in a way that may moot some of the concern about concentration.

First, contracting requires hustle just like moving a product does. It's an investment decision (of time, rather than money) in a way that a 9-5 job can't be. It involves company building and has knock-on effects (recruiting, applications for IP) that can help the product business. And it is flexible.

And this whole notion that you need unbreakable concentration to start a company seems like an extension of the idea that there's a runway, launch, and hockey-stick curve to all product businesses. But those things that yo' liable to read in de blog posts, they ain't necessarily so. Particularly if you have a functioning consulting engine.

I'm less familiar with direct-to-consumer products than most people on HN are; I sell to businesses. The overlap between selling services to companies and selling products to companies is significant. Maybe you should consider something businesses want, so you have options besides getting shot out of the VC cannon.

I do B2C stuff like many here. If you are planning on using SEO or AdWords as channels, there will be long stretches where your ability to improve is rate-limited by Google loving, and you can literally acquire that while deceased. (Don't die! But understand that whatever you are spinning your wheels on isn't improving rankings if it isn't winning links.)

Contracting "on the side" can give your startup(s) an effectively infinite runway. Hard to beat that.

What do you mean about consulting being good for recruiting? Surely you don't poach employees from your clients?

Of course we don't. Being able to pay people is very good for recruiting, is my point.

Any advice on filling a contracting pipeline with clients while trying to make the most of your early core work too?

Not really, because I haven't mastered that. But if you're trying to build a startup in the (say) server monitoring space, a great bootstrapping approach would be to do a bunch of server monitoring contracts and keep the IP (which isn't too hard if you say you're using "prior inventions").

Any advice on how to go about getting contracts for, say, server monitoring space?

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