Step Zero of Starting a Business: Quitting Your Job

To anyone reading this: please take this with a grain of salt.

The first step of starting any business is not to kill off your main source of income. Having a job and starting a business actually helps you focus your priorities on only what is needed to get the business running and (hopefully) profitable. Otherwise, how are you going to make ends meet while you aren't working your day job?

What's also nice about finding the important items needed to get the business running is that, when you finally decide to quit your day job, you now know the important things in the business that you must prioritize. It's like saying "If I only had an extra 10 hours a week to work on the business, it would be 50% more profitable". But by quitting your job before the business has started, you can't be certain of what effect your job had (or did not have) on running your business.

I always tense up when I see people quit their job with no revenue plan, no prototype, and no idea of a team. 

I'd much rather have the experience of building a bunch of test projects and really exploring who I worked well with in my free time after work and on weekends, and have a definite fundraising, demo or beta with users, or other traction before deciding to quit my job. It not only makes the move easier, but it also is a good test of the people you're working with. Are they interested enough in the idea to spend their free time on it? Do you enjoy the work? Is it fun? Are you solving a core problem? 

I've seen people leave their day jobs for a "to do list app" "startup". That is not a startup. It is a project for understanding how to build things and gather people around and idea so that when you're ready to do the thing you want to do, you have made enough mistakes with little projects that you don't waste your time doing them when it really matters. 

Bottom line is this: leave your job when you have a solid plan, not a dream. Study the start of Adobe Systems. They knew when to leave and when to stay. 

Thank you for the feedback. It appears that I chose a title for my article that struck a nerve with some of you. It was not my intent to encourage readers to rashly quit their jobs to start their own poorly thought-out businesses; though in hindsight, I can see how it got interpreted that way. It was my intent to describe the intrinsic connection that your fledgling business shares with your current and past employers and the importance and benefits of honoring that connection. To clarify this point, I have renamed the article to "Quitting Your Job to Pursue Your New Company" and rewritten a portion of the first paragraph. I hope that this new title causes less confusion.

I'm sure this isn't exactly the same for all YC companies, but the biggest thing YC did for our startup was to get us to quit our jobs and work on the company full time.

step zero is to have common sense.

    "Bob:           I quit my job to create a cool startup"
    "Bob's friends: (applauses) Wow, Awesome Bob!"

if this works for you, that's great, it won't work for many other people, if not for most. 95% chance it won't work for Bob either.

but what does work is "common sense", which gets overlooked and dismissed constantly in favor of "advice" from Iknowitall wannabes.

step zero is not quitting your job. step zero might be making money, it might be creating an MVP, it might even just be opening a dedicated savings account or doing a bunch of research, but it definitely is not quitting your job.

apologies if I'm being pedantic.