

Step Zero of Starting a Business: Quitting Your Job - greenagain
http://agileleague.com/2012/02/step-zero-of-starting-a-business-quitting-your-job/

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typicalrunt
To anyone reading this: please take this with a grain of salt.

The first step of starting any business is not to kill off your main source of
income. Having a job and starting a business actually helps you focus your
priorities on only what is needed to get the business running and (hopefully)
profitable. Otherwise, how are you going to make ends meet while you aren't
working your day job?

What's also nice about finding the important items needed to get the business
running is that, when you finally decide to quit your day job, you now know
the important things in the business that you must prioritize. It's like
saying "If I only had an extra 10 hours a week to work on the business, it
would be 50% more profitable". But by quitting your job before the business
has started, you can't be certain of what effect your job had (or did not
have) on running your business.

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caseorganic
I always tense up when I see people quit their job with no revenue plan, no
prototype, and no idea of a team.

I'd much rather have the experience of building a bunch of test projects and
really exploring who I worked well with in my free time after work and on
weekends, and have a definite fundraising, demo or beta with users, or other
traction before deciding to quit my job. It not only makes the move easier,
but it also is a good test of the people you're working with. Are they
interested enough in the idea to spend their free time on it? Do you enjoy the
work? Is it fun? Are you solving a core problem?

I've seen people leave their day jobs for a "to do list app" "startup". That
is _not_ a startup. It is a project for understanding how to build things and
gather people around and idea so that when you're ready to do the thing you
want to do, you have made enough mistakes with little projects that you don't
waste your time doing them when it really matters.

Bottom line is this: leave your job when you have a solid plan, not a dream.
Study the start of Adobe Systems. They knew when to leave and when to stay.

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greenagain
Thank you for the feedback. It appears that I chose a title for my article
that struck a nerve with some of you. It was not my intent to encourage
readers to rashly quit their jobs to start their own poorly thought-out
businesses; though in hindsight, I can see how it got interpreted that way. It
was my intent to describe the intrinsic connection that your fledgling
business shares with your current and past employers and the importance and
benefits of honoring that connection. To clarify this point, I have renamed
the article to "Quitting Your Job to Pursue Your New Company" and rewritten a
portion of the first paragraph. I hope that this new title causes less
confusion.

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krambs
I'm sure this isn't exactly the same for all YC companies, but the biggest
thing YC did for our startup was to get us to quit our jobs and work on the
company full time.

~~~
urbanjunkie
Sure, but getting to YC means you were way beyond Step 0

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tolitius
step zero is to have common sense.

    
    
        "Bob:           I quit my job to create a cool startup"
        "Bob's friends: (applauses) Wow, Awesome Bob!"
    

if this works for you, that's great, it won't work for many other people, if
not for most. 95% chance it won't work for Bob either.

but what does work is "common sense", which gets overlooked and dismissed
constantly in favor of "advice" from Iknowitall wannabes.

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iamgilesbowkett
step zero is not quitting your job. step zero might be making money, it might
be creating an MVP, it might even just be opening a dedicated savings account
or doing a bunch of research, but it definitely is not quitting your job.

apologies if I'm being pedantic.

~~~
feralchimp
No need to apologize; you're exactly right. The article is more about why
someone should quit their job "gracefully", and "without burning bridges"
(duh) and gives no real argument for why quitting is necessary in the first
place.

