

No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up - mipapage
http://www.thisux.com/2012/06/25/watch-out-for-no-mans-land-on-the-road-to-bootstrapping-a-start-up/

======
jasonkester
I've never understood the math behind this attitude that bootstrapping a
profitable business needs to take up 100% percent of your time, to the
exclusion of sleep, friends, and life in general. It just doesn't need to be
that way.

Example: During the first year of bootstrapping Twiddla, I lived quite
comfortably in a nice little apartment overlooking Plaza del Castillo in
Pamplona, working the days I was inspired to and rock climbing the days I
wasn't. Money was going out the door (though not particularly fast at Spanish
real estate & wine prices), but nowhere near fast enough to sweat about it at
all.

At one point, I downed tools and did 3 months of consulting (with the
aforementioned climbing breaks mixed in and plenty of days back on the real
project when inspiration struck) to sock away enough to bootstrap the next
year. No 60 hour weeks. No broken marriages. Just a really fun time spent
writing code and building something that would eventually start paying the
rent.

Consulting pays _very well_. Like _embarrassingly_ well. If what you're doing
doesn't pay enough to sock away 3 month's runway for every month you do it,
you're either not charging enough or are living way too large. Bootstrapping
from consulting income is absolutely doable. No need to pull out pie charts to
make it work. It just does.

------
yesimahuman
I am in a similar situation, but attacked it from a different direction. We
are almost ramen profitable, and built our company (<http://codiqa.com/>)
almost exclusively while working 9-5 jobs. We'd work 9-5 then come home and
work four hours a night, sometimes more. We did that for several months before
we launched in February of this year. I don't sacrifice personal time, and we
are still growing. Granted, we are young and have very few obligations, but it
works. We have never taken on client work, but it's definitely an option
should we need to.

The point is, I don't agree you have to sacrifice personal time to be
successful. I think it's very healthy to have things outside of work, if only
because it makes you do the work that's most important when you _are_ working.

That being said, I probably work way more than I realize, because it's not
really work to me.

~~~
LeFever
Absolutely. We started out in very similar fashion, working on our product on
the side and only quitting our day jobs when we absolutely had to to progress
further.

For the first two months we regularly put in at least 12 hours a day seven
days a week. We progressed, but towards the end of it we were barely
recognizable. The amount of stress it put on us, our family, and our friends
was immense. I'd drag myself to a bar to see friends and I'd spend most of the
time zoning out, thinking about what I needed to work on as soon as I was back
at home.

We've since forced ourselves to adopt a more structured approach, and factored
in time to go fishing, play snooker, sing karaoke, or just relax. We're still
working like crazy, but with a little bit of balance it no longer feels like
the drudgery it had become before.

------
theallan
I must admit my big difficultly when trying to get this balance right is
saying no to client work in order to have time to develop the product. It can
be incredibly hard to say no to a few $ when you have no guaranteed income.

~~~
makalumhenders
We don't have a problem saying no to new clients. Our problem tends to be
dealing with expanding needs from existing clients.

~~~
theallan
Agreed! Saying no to a new client who contacts you is not too difficult
(although depending on circumstances a pile of bank notes being waved at you
can influence the decision...) - but it is much harder, at least I find, to
say no to existing clients for fear of damaging the relationship.

------
krschultz
I wonder if you can do a bit more for clients and take the money and use it to
hire more people doing outsourced work.

If you can pay for 2-3 hours of outsourced work for every hour of client work,
doesn't that effectively 'buy' more time?

~~~
makalumhenders
I guess it would depend on the type of client services you do. We do
specialized product design and development, and that's not something you can
easily outsource.

~~~
SatvikBeri
I think the idea is to replace other types of work with fewer hours of client
work. Eg you can get some big wins by hiring a personal assistant and cleaning
service to handle stuff on the "fixed personal commitments side", outsource
some of the product work, etc.

------
mipapage
Interesting piece from someone who has built, shipped and had success.
Personally we're just climbing out of what he described as no-man's land... A
situation that we seemed to slowly slip into.

