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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

Scott and I were able to pretty much jump from full time employee to the 1 week on -- 3 week off model. We did have one client in between that was just a 4 week job. The only reason we were doing consulting was to bankroll us while we worked on our product -- so we pretty much skipped the own clients and team/agency step.

I do think most people probably took the route you described though.

It'd be great if you could give some more details around finding and arranging work with this ideal client. It doesn't seem likely that this was your first interaction with the client. What was your relationship before you guys quit your job? How did you initially get in touch with them?

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