I'll throw my hat into the ring. After a decade of working in the digital agency world, I left a well paying job at an agency in Los Angeles to start my own studio in early 2009. Because I was fortunate enough to have amazing connections I managed to land large projects with UFC, Picnik (now Google), Microsoft, Volcom and others. I was running the studio solo and operating as the creative director while I outsourced various roles. The business was off to a great start financially, but the time required was insane. It was full of 100+ hour weeks and frequent "I know it's Friday, but can you have something ready to show us on Monday?" emails.
During a gap in between two client projects in May 2010 I got an email from a designer at Tumblr asking if I would be interested in selling premium themes on their platform. As an experiment I took a few weeks to design, develop and launch a theme. Instantly I realized this would be a great supplement to the client work. After launching the third theme, it hit me that with just a bit more work it could replace all the income from all the client accounts I had. By October 2010 I officially stopped taking on clients and the theme sales revenue surpassed the client services revenue.
Officially I opened up shop as Style Hatch - http://stylehatch.co. Earlier this year I was able to hire my first full-time employee as a director of customer experience, and now I'm looking to hire a designer and developer. As of right now we still only have Tumblr themes for sale, but we're working on a few new platforms to launch for in the next few month.
For the first time I was able to truly control the amount of time that I wanted to put into the business, as opposed to being controlled by client schedules. With two young kids I have taken advantage of the success by taking plenty of half-days off to go to swim lessons, head to the beach, or just being there. This summer was also the first time that I was able to take a two week vacation and completely unplug from email and work.