Ask HN: What helped you leave your day job and start on your own? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What helped you leave your day job and start on your own?

24 pointssourabh8614 comments

Question to entrepreneurs who left a day job to start their own company, what helped you make the decision? Did you already have a running business before leaving or just had an idea or left your job and started searching for something to work on? I have a few things in which I want to do, but leaving the comfort of monthly salary seems very difficult specially because job enables me to financially help my family. Does that mean I am not motivated enough and it would be idiotic to leave the job? My job doesn't motivate me to do anything challenging and is full of enterprise politics.

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I recently made this jump. I'm a programmer and I wanted to work on some ideas I have. It helps that I can also do some contract work to keep some money coming in. Here are the main things that helped me make the jump:

1. Believing in myself

Almost everywhere I've worked I've never been included in important decisions and I've seen teams I'm on make poor decisions without consulting me. This is entirely because of egos. People that work for other people aren't trying to build that business, they're trying to build themselves within that business. These egos and politics got in my way far more than I could stomach anymore. I've also noticed a big difference between my enthusiasm and passion for becoming a better programmer and that of my coworkers. I hope to be able to employ other people someday and give them a great culture for building and learning.

2. Having Money/Savings

I saved a lot of this before making the jump recently. Some people might recommend 6 months of savings, I saved enough for quite a bit longer than that and I hope I can maintain a lifestyle at least similar to what I had before. I'm married without kids but it's very important for me to not put any burden on my wife with my starting of a business. Trust me, no matter how good you feel before going into this, your head will get messed with a lot as those first few Fridays pass by and no direct deposit is hitting your bank account. It takes a few times to get over it.

3. Desire for more Money/Savings/Freedom

The advancements that you make in wealth when working for someone else are very incremental. Maybe I'm just impatient, but I want bigger earning potential and I want it quicker. It helps that I can do some consulting to make a little bit of money while I work on the product ideas that I have.

> People that work for other people aren't trying to build that business, they're trying to build themselves within that business.

I really like this sentence. I've been looking for a way to express this thought nicely.

Thanks! that is very helpful. I am in a similar situation. Need to save a bit more and then probably it'd be the right time.

What helped me was: 1) I had saved a year's living expenses, 2) I left my job after the end of a project, rather than in the middle, 3) I had a specific idea that I wanted to pursue, and the idea was not in the same area as my old company.

I am perhaps more risk averse than some people on HN, so I thought carefully about my plan while saving money.

I realized that when I quit, that my company might not succeed and that I may either need or want to work for someone else again. Therefore, I wanted to be able to tell to a future potential employer a story I would be proud of: "Yes, I did quit a job to start a company, but when I left my old job I showed professional responsibility by finishing my project. I'd didn't quit in the middle and I didn't quit because I didn't like working or because I hated my job, I left to do something positive and start a company doing the following carefully thought-out idea. Also, I did not steal this idea from my old company. Even though the idea did not work out perfectly, I learned a lot, and now I can be a more valuable employee to you."

Thanks, that makes sense, but I might not be able to complete the project I have been assigned as it is a long term thing, but I'll be able to give the first deliverable and do a knowledge transfer. That was always the plan. My situation is like you, just need to work on #1

I haven't left my day job, but I've definitely struggled with the same thoughts about whether I was "flaking out" by not leaving a stable but non-challenging job.

First, you should never feel guilty about providing for your family. We glorify start-ups in silicon valley because of survivorship bias and it's silly given the realities of a person's family responsibilities. So let's get that out of the way.

Second, if you think about leaving all at once it can seem daunting. Instead, you should prepare yourself over the next years to manage the risks of starting your own business. This means understanding your family finances, saving money, setting a timeline for your business, and setting a time to call it quits and go back to a salary job to reorganize.

Make a plan, communicate with your family about your goals, and then prepare yourself to execute that plan. Good luck!

If you want to dive into self-employment and it seems daunting compared to steady income, you gotta make it so that change can will be easy, then make that easy change (got that from a Twitter quote somewhere).

I’m not running a product company, I do UI consulting instead, but for me the ways I made the change easy was: saving enough money so I didn’t have to worry about feast & famine times that naturally occur with freelancing, reading a bunch on running a consulting/freelancing business and letting people know that I will soon be available for work. Then when the right time came I just made the easy change.

I haven't been an keen reader, but recently started reading stuff online and offline. Recently read "Rework" by Jason Fried. What good reads do you recommend for consulting/freelancing? How difficult was it to get work in initial days? Is it not very difficult to get work for someone who has no freelance projects to showcase?

Part of the “make the change easy” was making sure that I had work lined up before leaving my job. So by the time I was ready to quit, I was already jumping into projects (these projects were with people that I had worked with in my last job and started their own companies or knew very well in the local startup scene).

It is difficult to get work without a showcase of some kind, especially a designer. That’s why I relied on contacts I would consider good friends as my first clients. As mentioned earlier, they either worked with me in some way or I’ve talked to them before about the cool stuff I was working on, but was ready to start something of my own. They didn’t need to see my work, because they either seen me work or have heard me talk about this stuff at local meetups (helps that the community is small here). Though I consider myself extremely lucky to not have had done any outbound sales for my first gigs, so YMMV.

As for reading material, these are the books I went through last month specifically for consulting/freelancing + the one I’m currently reading. If you’re not a designer I’d just recommend reading the last three.

- The Designer’s Guide to Freelancing (http://nathanpowell.me/guide-to-freelancing/)

- Design Is a Job (http://www.abookapart.com/products/design-is-a-job)

- Double Your Freelancing Rate (http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/)

- Million Dollar Consulting (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002MPQ230/)

I got fired for not disclosing a company directorship/founding.

I had little choice but to get on with a it after that.

I doubt this is the kind of path most people would want to take though! I imagine there are easier ways than sink or swim.

I was deeply unhappy with working for other people and it only got less tolerable every day. Running off the cliff was the only way through; at the time it made no sense (I had little saved and no backup plan and no funding).

You left just because you did not want to work for someone else? Is that a good enough reason to leave a job? At that time it didn't make sense, but how is it coming along now? More insights on what did you learn from it?

cash in the bank, ticking time clock with career/kids

I felt the whip.

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