No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up

I've never understood the math behind this attitude that bootstrapping a profitable business needs to take up 100% percent of your time, to the exclusion of sleep, friends, and life in general. It just doesn't need to be that way.

Example: During the first year of bootstrapping Twiddla, I lived quite comfortably in a nice little apartment overlooking Plaza del Castillo in Pamplona, working the days I was inspired to and rock climbing the days I wasn't. Money was going out the door (though not particularly fast at Spanish real estate & wine prices), but nowhere near fast enough to sweat about it at all.

At one point, I downed tools and did 3 months of consulting (with the aforementioned climbing breaks mixed in and plenty of days back on the real project when inspiration struck) to sock away enough to bootstrap the next year. No 60 hour weeks. No broken marriages. Just a really fun time spent writing code and building something that would eventually start paying the rent.

Consulting pays very well. Like embarrassingly well. If what you're doing doesn't pay enough to sock away 3 month's runway for every month you do it, you're either not charging enough or are living way too large. Bootstrapping from consulting income is absolutely doable. No need to pull out pie charts to make it work. It just does.

I am in a similar situation, but attacked it from a different direction. We are almost ramen profitable, and built our company (http://codiqa.com/) almost exclusively while working 9-5 jobs. We'd work 9-5 then come home and work four hours a night, sometimes more. We did that for several months before we launched in February of this year. I don't sacrifice personal time, and we are still growing. Granted, we are young and have very few obligations, but it works. We have never taken on client work, but it's definitely an option should we need to.

The point is, I don't agree you have to sacrifice personal time to be successful. I think it's very healthy to have things outside of work, if only because it makes you do the work that's most important when you are working.

That being said, I probably work way more than I realize, because it's not really work to me.

I must admit my big difficultly when trying to get this balance right is saying no to client work in order to have time to develop the product. It can be incredibly hard to say no to a few $ when you have no guaranteed income.

I wonder if you can do a bit more for clients and take the money and use it to hire more people doing outsourced work.

If you can pay for 2-3 hours of outsourced work for every hour of client work, doesn't that effectively 'buy' more time?

Interesting piece from someone who has built, shipped and had success. Personally we're just climbing out of what he described as no-man's land... A situation that we seemed to slowly slip into.