Funding your startup with a "one week on, three weeks off" consulting setup

Another way to approach this is to start a consulting business full-time, and use it as a springboard for whatever product idea strikes your fancy once you're established. As in, later; like, maybe a year later.

It's true that it's hard to balance consulting and product as a bootstrapping product startup. I used to get hung up on trying to explain how doable it is while acknowledging the pitfalls. Now I think, if you're not sure which way to go, put aside the product and just get a consulting practice up and running. Don't try to balance it. Don't worry about how you'll fit product into it.

I think you'll find that starting a product (or multiple products!) from a consulting practice is much, much easier than trying to do it by quitting a full-time W2 job. Meanwhile, probably about 40% of the work you do in your consulting practice is going to apply directly to your product company --- you'll learn to sell, to bill clients, to hire, to run payroll, and (most importantly) how to work with your team members.

I think that the progression is usually:

full time employee -> part time contractor -> consultant with own clients -> own team and agency -> your own startup

investors can short circuit this, but this is how many companies including 37signals started

Guide to Starting a (Really) Successful Business:

Step 1: Start a successful business.

Step 2: Use the money from step one to start your really successful business.

Step 3: Profit

I like this concept but it is a client that can cater for this schedule.

I work three days a week as a consultant and the rest of the week I work on my product http://weekplan.net

Yes you have to context switch a bit, but you can deal with urgent stuff for both the client and your product on an ongoing basis.

It is easier to find a client that is ok for you to work only three days a week, and this is very important because it makes finding clients easier and therefore you re not distracted from your product.

Also because I can't work on my product for three days, it gives me some perspective on what I am doing and recharge the motivation battery constantly.

My team and I also tried this same approach for my mobile education startup - but differently.

The issue with working one week on, and three weeks off is that the client is willing to accommodate you flying off the radar for three weeks, and that makes it hard for them to plan their product according to your timing.

What we tried at App Ninja was to work a normal six day week, 12 hours a day. We would work on our product for the first 8 hours of the day, and the remaining 4 hours, we will work on our client projects.

I am an iOS developer and am fluent with web backends. So I was doing everything from iOS development to Ruby on Rails web apps. We charged by the project instead of hourly, and at one point in time, I actually earned USD $2,000 in 4 hours by completing a project in that time span.

If you work fast, charging by the project, instead of hourly can actually be beneficial.

We did this for almost 5 months to get our product off the ground, and other than being absolutely physically exhausting, it worked pretty well. Our clients were none the wiser, as we still delivered projects on time and on schedule.

Sometime if you're not a hacker or you're one but want to focus on your startup, then taking a less "serious" job can do the trick also. I've met we've guys that even worked night shifts in security and coded all day long. Others did even customer support from home. Got the bills paid while they build their project. Getting a $4K a month client is something that's can take considerable amount of time to achieve.