How to do a startup in your spare time
blog.bellebethcooper.com
blog.bellebethcooper.com
What does your boss/supervisor think of your startup? How much do you talk about it at work?
Are you worried that your full-time employer will think you're doing your work on their time? Are you worried that you may be technically doing your work on their computers (even by logging into Asana or a similar site)?
How do you juggle meeting clients, contacts, mentors, other cofounders, with your day job? Not everyone can meet in the evenings and at weekends.
How do you send urgent emails related to your startup in your day job?
Will you consider leaving your current job/position to work full-time? Have you set yourself goals or conditions for going full-time (revenue/traction/funding/other?).
> What does your boss/supervisor think of your startup?
My boss had no reason to know, although she eventually found out through other means. It didn't affect my day job at all so it was a non-issue. I had no reason to bring it up and neither did she.
> How much do you talk about it at work?
Not at all. Work is for work.
> Are you worried that your full-time employer will think you're doing your work on their time?
They knew me well enough to know that I would never do that to them.
> Are you worried that you may be technically doing your work on their computers (even by logging into Asana or a similar site)?
Do not do anything on work hardware, ever. In many parts of the US this may actually entitle them to something (though IANAL and don't want to open that can of worms). Just don't do it. There's no reason to.
Ideally, you wouldn't even do startup-related things on your personal hardware (e.g. phone) during work hours or while at work.
> How do you juggle meeting clients, contacts, mentors, other cofounders, with your day job?
The job I had when I was doing this had an owner who was a butts-in-the-office type (part of why I left). Because of this, the simple answer was "I didn't," unless it was over lunch. If the folks your meeting with know you're working full-time - they probably should - then they'll know you can't meet for coffee at 10 AM. Most of the time they will be impressed that you respect your employer enough not to use their time to build your business.
The job I have now is not so stringent on time. I could go have coffee with someone at 10 AM if I had a really good reason (up to me to decide), and we all put in enough hours that nobody is counting how long you're away from the desk.
> How do you send urgent emails related to your startup in your day job?
As I said earlier, work is for work. It needs to be really bad to require attention from you when you're being paid by your employer to do what they want.
I obviously can't answer the last point, but I'd like to leave you with one thought. It would be great if everyone had the time, ability, and means to bootstrap a business on the side while getting paid full time, but the unfortunate truth is that some people don't. You may have a job that required you to sign something prohibiting it explicitly. You may just have a job that is too close to your passion such that any business would be a competitor. Or, you may just have an asshole boss who makes you work 60-80 hours a week for a 2% raise and a $300 Christmas bonus.
So, if you're actually trying the "ignorance is bliss" strategy for managing $dayjob relation, then consulting a lawyer up front could save you an awful lot of trouble later.
As for those types of contracts assigning tech IP to $dayjob, that’s what I was alluding to. If you have one of those, unfortunately you cannot start a business without risking $dayjob wanting a piece (or all of it). Regardless of how often they stand up in court or are even tentatively enforced, I wouldn’t want to risk it.
I know this depends on the company, but, as a general rule, are these clauses really taken so lightly?
I fought the good fight against some silly assertions such as "They could not have built this in so little time without overlapping working hours" but lost the battle when the VCs pointed to the timestamps of some support/feedback comments posted by one of my Engineers on the project's website. He had written those and posted during working hours while sitting in the office of said "day job"
Project squashed, all the IP was rolled up and shelved. It was a bad day.
TL;DR these clauses are typically not enforced because your side project is typically viewed as worthless. If on the other hand your project is seen as a source of value... tread carefully.
In short, by taking these clauses lightly, you are creating failure paths for yourself that begin from the initial light of success. You may not want to kill your big success even before it happens. If your goal is just to create a side income, you would most likely be fine simply because a lawsuit would cost more money than what it may recover, or you may just get some threats/scoldings.
I have heard that if your side project or startup reaches something like $10 million in revenues, your big-company employer actually becomes liable to their shareholders to recover this money from you since it technically belongs to the shareholders.
Some high-profile entrepreneurs have told me that you should not worry about lawsuits as they only come when you succeed and when you do, you have resources to take care of them. But I have also known specific cases of things doing down because of such issues (like the example from etsimm, who also responded to your comment).
By the way, YCombinator submission form includes a question on such IP issues, though I may guess everyone just blindly picks "No issues" for it.
- Talk as little as possible. Even if you have a very transparent, honest relationship with you boss. If your boss might find detrimental you to have a startup, don't talk at all.
- Never use the company's computer to any kind of work on your startup. For emergencies (and you must really have a high treshold for emergencies) use your smartphone. But try to do everything out of work hour (before, after and during lunch).
- If you have a day-job you won't have an ideal startup management. Accept it. So forget about mentors, you won't be the co-founder doing the fundraise with investors (if all the co-founders have day-job, there would be no fundraising at all). You will try to prove the concept, maybe some traction. Only when you quit you start fundraise (if you need it). Meeting with clients, only on lunch. Meeting with co-founder, only in the evenings and weekends (if your co-founders can't do it, than you have a deeper problem here).
- Urgent emails only through smartphone. And be criterious about "urgency".
- If you are founding a startup with a day-job you must have already decided that, at the first time possible, you will quit your job to work full-time. There is no "consideration", it must be inherent to found a startup. And about the criteria to do it, I think the best one is enough revenue or funding to pay your own salary. But set a reasonable goal for your salary, don't expect to make the same as your day-job, calculate your minimum life cost possible and that's it. Funding is good, but if all co-founders have day-jobs, it will be just a illusion, so don't consider it.
If you start to manage better your risk-aversion, you may use the traction criteria. When you discover that you have a product people want, do some math with your reservers, calculate how many months you can go without income, if it is more than 6 months, go for it
"- Talk as little as possible. Even if you have a very transparent, honest relationship with you boss. If your boss might find detrimental you to have a startup, don't talk at all."
I think it is better to talk about the possibility of a startup on your own time during the interview process. This has the side effect of filtering out jobs with controlling bosses. (You may not have this luxury, though.)
Our tech agreement lets someone list a set of technologies they own that they are bringing with them, and explicitly renounces the company's ownership of them. It's also useful to understand and review any agreements you sign when accepting employment.
I have a side project that I told my boss about when accepting employment. And I started another one while employed.
I guess it depends on whether you think forgiveness is better than permission, and how your boss is, but as a manager I would rather know someone has a startup project.
You shouldn't consider a startup on the side without reading and understanding this onstartups.com q&a: http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-...
One other important point: if your startup is orthogonal to your current work, everyone is probably going to be more comfortable. If not, I'd seriously consider postponing the startup, just to avoid a sticky situation where your employer is concerned you took domain knowledge/contacts from your day job to improve your startup.
All the rest of this advice is fantastic. A clear separation of startup and day job is important.
Totally. One thing to keep in mind though is that the exclusion applies only for work done before joining the company [1]. Even if you list something there, if you continue working on it, you may still have an issue.
Further, all IP agreements I have come across, put a legal requirement on you to disclose any new IP you generate while employed to the employer within the prescribed time-limit even if you think if belongs to you.
[1] In all cases I have come across. IANAL.
Her important headings for "doing a startup in your spare time":
- Managing tasks
- Sharing links
- Talking to other founders
- Emailing customers
- Blogging
- Weekly catch-ups
Building anything of value tends to be difficult; doing it in your spare time is incredibly difficult. Here's why:
- In spite of you best efforts, you will be too tired after your day job.
- When you're "in the zone" you won't be able to work on your start-up. When your working on your start-up, you won't be able to get "into the zone".
- You won't have long enough blocks of time to get large chunks done.
- Your attention will more easily be diverted to other things (the day job).
- It takes so much longer to have a deliverable, you will lose momentum and interest and get easily distracted or drawn to something shinier.
So what should you do? 3 things, religiously:
1. Determine your "Big Fat What". Have a precise definition of exactly what you're going to build. That's right, you must write requirements to yourself. Following the path of least resistance simply won't work for a part-time start-up because you will never be able to sustain enough momentum. Writing requirements forces you to have better discipline and better plan, and it's also the kind of work that fits nicely into those 2 hour blocks of time you have during the week.
2. Determine your "Big Fat How". This is when you translate your requirements into technical specs. You know, program definitions and flows, page layouts, data base schemas, etc. Yes, again you will be writing specs to yourself. Steps 1 & 2 are kinda like linear algebra; you'll spend a lot of time doing seemingly mindless unnecessary steps to get to the where you really want to be...
3. Build it. You do this on weekends when you have large enough blocks of time to crank. But your capability to build will only be as good as your preparation. As you struggle with Step 3, you'll appreciate Steps 1 & 2 and get better at them. Then you'll be surprised at how much progress you can make building in your spare time.
Once you have something built (a true feat in any part-time start-up) then (and only then) do OP's suggestions come into play.
Thank you. Again.
But I can't figure out why you even bothered to comment about her posting. If you had to "educate" every startup hipster on what is wrong with their self aggrandizing blog posts, you would never have time to produce anything. Were you afraid other founders would take her musing as "law" and ruin their lives? I think the less attention these interruptions get, the better chance they will die out of pop culture, and more production can get done. I can't believe i'm wasting my time writing this.
Doing a startup in your spare time is really, really hard. We could've launched months ago but with limited time we're forced to keep pushing back. There are benefits to this — it keeps you really lean, because you just don't have time for all the little extras. But I'd still rather have more time, especially in big blocks. Our main time is evenings and weekends, which limits us severely.
Belle works full-time for Buffer doing content, and they're incredibly supportive of us and Exist. Working for a startup who have been there not so long ago is probably one of the points to mention which make this more sustainable. Belle's time is flexible as she works remotely, meaning she can make time in her day for meetings, emails, etc., and still be able to complete her work for Buffer.
And I'm freelancing at the moment, meaning my time is just as flexible (in theory — if you're flat-out, that doesn't mean much).
I think edw519's points are good complement in terms of actually building your product and managing your time.
Part time startups work only if you are trying to start a "home business" that is very different from you day job.
You work at Best Buy, and want to start a new search engine. Great. That is better than quitting you job to start a new search engine.
You work at Google and want to start a social network. You are going to get fired. There is a good chance Google will own your code, and you won't have enough time to get your social network off the ground, so now you are doubly screwed.
You work at Google and want to start a business selling Clay ovens on the weekend. Congrats you have a startup that won't break Google's moonlighting rules.
This is not the case to the best of my knowledge.
See details in my older comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6245810
When.