http://likesbuildingthings.blogspot.com/2011/12/i-know-many-...
People who are willing to take the risk of founding tend to be workaholics by nature, but you don't need to be a workaholic by nature to be a founder. It's bad for you longterm and it sets a poisonous precedent for your company culture.
You don't run those at a fast pace, you complete them in like 8-11 hours. Perhaps that's a better metaphor.
Think about it, let's say you have a perfectly reasonable 40 hour work week. What would be a good extra amount to put into a side project/startup? 20 hours?
Now you're working 60 hours per week, just under an extra 3 hours per night. How long can you keep that up? How much time will that take away from your family?
Let's say you stick it through and launch. The questions and support emails roll in. How much of that will eat up your extra 20 hours per week to work on bugs and new features? And will your customers be ok with waiting the extra time while you slog away at your day job?
And what happens if that 40 hour/week job goes into crunch mode and goes up to 50 or maybe even more?
Doing this isn't necessarily hard in terms of difficulty, but it does take a LOT of time.
When I'm hanging out with friends or my family I'm not 100% there. I'm running over marketing scenarios in my head, trying to figure out how to squash this weird bug, or figuring out whether I should spend time talking with that one investor or not.
So no, I don't think it needs to take over all aspects of your life, but I'm not sure you can consciously stop it.
In the four years since quitting my day job to freelance and build my app, I've gotten engaged, married, gone on a honeymoon, got a dog, gone to Europe for a week, and had our first child. I also regularly go on vacation and go snowboarding. I've been full-time on Sifter for about half of that time. So I was part-time for about two years, and that was hard work balancing the two, but it wasn't that bad. I just split time between freelancing and building the company. It was stressful at times, but well worth it.
In my case these days, as a solo founder, it's a bit involved. I work every day, but for the most part, I still only work 40 hours per week. I work from home and see my wife and daughter all of the time and find time to go to the gym every single day. I take breaks and spend time with them whenever I want, and I just work whenever it fits into the family schedule. The only catch is that it's very hard to stop thinking about work in my downtime, but I think that has as much to do with me and being passionate about work as it does being a business owner.
It hasn't been a cakewalk by any means, but it's entirely possible. I've got a slide deck that covers some of the personal side of things if you're interested. (http://bootstrapping.sifterapp.com)
Second you have to make it profitable as soon as possible, so you can leave your job and at least start contracting 2-3 days per week, leaving full days to work on your startup.
Third, the sacrifice depends on the nature of your startup: if it's a no brainer like a management tool and you're a smart programmer, you won't need to get mad. But if it's really techy, then you better find some mate to not get lost in the venture and use up every minute of your free time.
That's my experience and what I've seen around the community here.
I can see why he'd take some time off and maybe start another venture that would lend itself to a more laid back culture.
My husband and I run a SaaS/infoproduct business which grossed right around $600k last year and we do not work long hours (or even 40 hours/wk). In 2011, we invested heavily in our next product, a new office, a lot of lawyering & tax accountanting (and made a couple rather big (hiring) mistakes with money), so our take-home wasn't glorious, but next year it will be.
We:
* built the product in a hack day a week or so for 3 mos * worked pretty hard the first year, since we were doing it alongside consulting; but literally there were weeks, and months, where we did nothing, and our business survived & even grew for a time * quit consulting in 2010 (me in Jan, my husband later)
To put this in perspective:
In late 2009, I had mono, which knocked me out for a few mos. I got better for a while, but then a series of viral infections landed me with chronic fatigue syndrome. Several times since then, I've been incapacitated for 1-3 mos.
Now I'm mostly better, but every time I get sick, I'm unable to work for a week or two. I don't make it up by working long hours when I'm well, either. We're talking 20-30 hours a week for me, max. We haven't worked more than a 40-hour work week for more than two weeks at a time in nearly 2 years, and our biz is 3 years old.
In short: it's totally doable.
Focus on solving a pain people will pay for. Build something simple, which doesn't require a lot of maintenance. Choose customers who aren't needy fuckers. Pick your hours.
Example: Our 1st product is a time tracking tool. Unsexy but it's got a run rate of just over $300k/yr now, just over 3 years old. We had 8% growth in revenue month over month from Dec to Jan. Which is totally sexy.
And… right now we're on a month-long trip to NZ. I've been working an average of an hour a day because I'm running a course to teach people how to build this kind of biz. (That's in 2-4 hour stretches, not actually 1 hour a day, which would be useless.) My husband hasn't worked at all on this trip except yesterday he had to reset one of our (redundant) servers because of an apparent hardware failure. That'll probably take a couple more hours of his time this week.
Sure, we could work more, hit it harder, and probably earn more money. But we're nicely on track for $1.5m in yearly revenue inside of ~2 more years (when I turn 30!) so I figure, why bother? What could we NOT have with $750k/yr of sustainable household income, even if we spent half the gross revenue on overhead (which is ridiculously unlikely)? We already get to touch thousands of people's lives every day. We can already invest in charities and nice things.
As Felix Dennis, who's ludicrously rich (in my mind), wrote in his very excellent How To Get Rich:
"Ask me what I will give you if you could wave a magic wand and give me my youth back. The answer would be everything I own and everything I will ever own."
He says no less than 3 times in his book that if he could go back to his youth and live a different life, he would have spent way, way, way less time accumulating his obscene (hundreds of $mils) riches and more time living. I take him at his word.
In short, it's totally possible. You won't believe it if you spend too much time reading HN, however. Or people will tell you that your ambition is too small… and sneer that you run a "lifestyle business." But then, you will have a life, so you can laugh all the way to the bank.
NB: I blog about this stuff at http://unicornfree.com in case you're interested.
So thank you, Amy, for proving me wrong.
This exact thing here -- the idea that "no one will pay for it" or a question of whether there is "still opportunity" -- is why hanging around HN without the right mental filters is detrimental to your success.
There is not only "still" opportunity in boring sectors like time tracking, there's LOTS of it. LOTS and lots. The more people who use a tool, the more pain they experience, the more people who are left out by certain viewpoints on how to build or run the tool, etc., who discover they need an alternative.
"Startups" may be sexy and exciting, but the basic tools people have to use to run their businesses and their lives still suck goatnuggets. And these basics are a friggin gold mine. :)
There is MORE opportunity there than in some green field where nobody has gone before, because there's a reason nobody has gone there before.
As for time tracking being something "no one will pay money for," tell that to all the businesses who I'm sure make wayyyyy more than we do -- Harvest, FreshBooks, RescueTime, toggl, mite, etc. For a long time, the only compelling reason to upgrade to the higher level of Basecamp was because it came with (the most terrible) time tracking. And lots of people upgraded.
People who say things like "no one will pay for that" pretty much never do their research. What they mean is "I won't pay for that," which is totally immaterial, just so much self-absorbed gasbaggery. They simply can't imagine that anyone is different from them. And there are tons of those people in the "startup scene."
If you just open your eyes and look at the businesses you interact with every day, and look at how long they've been in biz, how many people they employ, what kinds of promotions they do, etc., you will see that there are a bazillion businesses like mine -- and much much much bigger -- which never make tech news coverage, they just quietly tick along making millions a year. I know a guy whose business has millions in revenue a year from a Wordpress plugin that you've never heard of.
But it's unsexy so HNers aren't generally interested. :)
So I pretty much hang around here for the occasional breaking news & the opportunity to spread the gospel. This discussion will turn into a series of blog posts so I'm getting something out of it too :)
I am the biz "visionary" (barf), the designer, marketer, copywriter rolled into one. Which is more than enough, believe me. :)
This time, we have part-time help in the form of an international business major at a local university. She's not an expert on our app, BUT for hard q's, she'll just let the folks know we'll get back soon.
Last summer, we had hired 2 full-time staff to do this and a variety of other things, but that was a major mistake for many reasons and we had to let them both go this fall (soooo stressful; now I am anti-hiring).
The other reasons our support load is so fast/light:
It's a mature product, without many bugs.
If things do go wrong, it's a time tracking tool, not the end of the world.
The UI of the product is really quite amazing, if I do say so myself; and that creates less confusion.
The look & feel of the app, our name, our marketing materials, our philosophy, our feature set attract and groom a certain kind of customer who is much more friendly and laid-back than the average SaaS customer. We get a tenth of the angry emails of friends who have a similar number of customers.
Finally, we ourselves are chill. Lots of folks with a business act as if the customer is a gunslinger shooting at their feet to make them dance. We do not. Early on in Freckle's life, we totally abandoned it for a month or two at a time, support included. Nothing terrible happened. I wouldn't do it again, but it puts it in perspective.
TIL that I've got to put the right mental filter on before coming to HN.
One question, obviously you don't have any high-touch sales going on, what do you do for marketing to find and convert new customers?