
Ask HN: how to start a startup when you need a proper salary - paghdv
Most startup stories describe how the founders at some point were not getting any salary, sharing rooms, sleeping in a couch, and barely sleeping. Is that the only way to be successful in a startup? What if you have two kids, a wife and a mortgage, should you just trash all your startup ideas and forget about starting one? What&#x27;s your opinion and can you share any relevant story?
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davismwfl
I come at this with experience of both successful and failed startups while
being married and raising kids. My question is do you want a "lifestyle"
business where you can make life changing money for you & your family plus
leave something for your kids or are you wanting to be a unicorn and/or change
the world?

Many times people in the tech startup world favor the unicorn idea, but the
reality of it is you can make a lot of money and personally be very
successful, plus make others successful all while not working yourself to
death. This requires a lot of focus on making a product/service and being
profitable from as early on as possible. In fairness I never worked on a
problem that could change the world until what I am doing now, but I am
currently in a funded startup where that is our focus.

Personally, in my past, I have done what many in the tech industry wouldn't
think is cool or a rocketship, but it changed people's lives, was profitable
very early on and we had a hell of a lot of fun, but we would never have been
considered on the unicorn track. This is for the businesses I created, I have
been part of funded and rocketship startups prior.

But if you could put a business together that would be say, $5-$15M a year in
revenue over 5-7 years and profitable at 30-40% where you control the majority
stake and it just keeps generating revenue year after year would you be happy?

Honestly you can start this type of business while working a full time job, it
requires a bit of time management but you can do it. When I did this as a FTE
I would work during the day, come home have dinner, spend time with the kids
and wife and than start working on the project at like 9-10pm when kids went
to bed, some nights I'd take off for time with the wife too. Then I'd pick one
day a weekend and work all day, but stop around 4 or so and spend time with
the family. This let me have some balance, but TBH it is still hard, but once
things start picking up it gets easier. I will say that if you go this route
you have to expect you'll have lean times where it is a struggle, and flush
times when things feel amazing, it is a bit of a roller coaster, so you need
to have balance and a supportive wife. And you need to make sure you
prioritize family times so you don't become the MIA parent.

You are welcome to send me an email (check my profile) if you want to chat
about it, having done it I get it is not easy.

~~~
JamesAdir
Great advice. I don't see it as "change the world ideas" vs. something that is
not. Pinterest isn't a changing world idea, so is Atrium or something else.
The difference is do you want to work on a business of your own and as with
any business it has to be profitable (I don't why it's called lifestyle
business - it's just business). The other option is to try and get someone to
gamble millions of dollars on your idea without being profitable for years.
Getting someone to gamble like this just requires a lot more time. That's all.

~~~
davismwfl
I agree, I don't like the term "lifestyle business", it is just a business,
but in the tech industry I have seen that term used in a derogatory way when
frankly I love that type of business.

Raising money can be done outside of the traditional tech VC world as well.
High net worth individuals who themselves own businesses many times are
willing to invest on pretty decent terms. But your point is super accurate,
raising money takes time focused on raising money and not building the
business or product, which is why incubators/VCs favor multi-founder startups.
The incubators all know essentially one founder will spend the majority of
their time raising capital, meeting new investors and finding warm intros to
investors etc. It is a full time job.

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eaenki
Just save up enough money to be comfortable not taking any salary for the next
15 months or so. Some ways to save include but are not limited to: buying in
bulk, skipping everything considered a perk, holidays, cooking 100% of the
time (I recommend meal prep)...

The problem with that is, more often than not great startups have a 12-16month
window to launch. Depending on your particular instance, you might miss yours
while you're saving up. A way to kinda mitigate that risk(or just an
alternative way on its own) is to work all the free time on it + get some
cofounders + raise a friends&family round.

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CloudBuddy
Fortunately, you don't need to quit your day job nor live a crazy lifestyle in
order to launch a startup. All you have to do is commit to working on it 5
minutes per day and it will happen.

This is what I followed when I built CloudBuddy
([https://cloudbuddy.cloud](https://cloudbuddy.cloud)). For any side project
it starts off being exciting and looking like a climbable mountain. Then when
you start to get into it, it seems daunting. Each day I would tell myself that
I am going to put one foot in front of the other and walk up the mountain. No
matter how slow it seems, I will make it to the top. Some days I was so burned
out; those were the days that I only worked 5 minutes on it and called it a
day. Other days, I was into it and naturally blew beyond the 5 minutes.

It took me 2 years and 3 months to launch CloudBuddy (which has paying users).
There isn't anything special about me or my circumstances - I'm married, have
a child and have a day job.

If your having difficulty starting or working consistently on your side
project and it would help to have someone to talk to, email or drop me a line.
My contact info is in my profile.

~~~
tixocloud
Really cool that you've built this simple service. How did you reach out to
your initial customers initially?

Also, assuming it's just a storage service at the moment? :) I'm in need of
storing docker containers on behalf of customers.

~~~
CloudBuddy
To date I haven't specifically tried to reach out directly to potential users.
I've just been posting on Hacker News!

CloudBuddy doesn't currently support storing Docker containers.

Here is a write up on 3 that do:
[https://www.nirmata.com/2017/03/14/comparing-container-
image...](https://www.nirmata.com/2017/03/14/comparing-container-image-
registries-dockerhub-amazon-ec2-and-jfrog-artifactory/)

With pricing on those 3 here: \- DockerHub ([https://hub.docker.com/billing-
plans/](https://hub.docker.com/billing-plans/)) \- Amazon Elastic Container
Registry
([https://aws.amazon.com/ecr/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/ecr/pricing/))
\- JFrog ([https://jfrog.com/pricing/#on-prem](https://jfrog.com/pricing/#on-
prem))

If you need something more custom, let me know and I can brainstorm with you
(my contact info is in my profile).

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saluki
[http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/archives](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/archives)

Listen to the archives, you can follow along with Rob as he stair steps up
from job boards to a SaaS with an exit. Lots of great advice on creating a
startup with kids, job, mortgage.

@DHH Startup School Talk (Inspiration)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY)

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danieltillett
You work like crazy in two jobs. I did exactly this putting in 100+ hour weeks
for around four years until mark II of my startup was profitable enough to
support me and my family.

~~~
codeisawesome
That’s amazing. May I ask a few follow up questions? Have you written more
about this anywhere? Did you do 100+ hours every week or maybe alternative
week etc.? Did it negatively impact your health? Did you manage to have any
family time?

Most important of all - what did you do about sleep? If you didn’t get much
sleep, how did you sustain that for 4+ years? May I see a sample of your daily
schedule?

I’m sorry if that was too much and too many questions - I’m deeply interested
in this subject.

~~~
danieltillett
I haven't written up about my 100+ hour weeks specifically, but from 2008 to
2012 I did literally nothing but work and sleep every day (7 days a week).
Even eating I did while answering emails, etc.

Sleep I didn't skimp on (7 hours average a night, but that is my norm even
now).

My day would start at 6.30am (sometimes earlier if I needed to call a customer
in a bad time zone), eat breakfast while dealing with emails, etc, go to work
around 8.30am (I luckily had a short commute), work until lunch, work on my
business over lunch, work more and come home around 6 pm, eat dinner and work,
then round out the day with some more work, and finally go to bed around
11.30pm (sometime later if I need to call customers, etc). Weekends were much
the same except no commute.

No I didn't get sick and physically I could have sustained it for as long as I
needed, the biggest side effect was my judgement started to become detached
from reality. It was a very slow and steady drift, but in hindsight I can see
my decisions were not always the best. Nothing catastrophic, but not the best
by any means.

This was the cost of building a business when you have a family to support. I
now get to spend a lot of time with my family, and while it wasn't easy, I
still think it was the right decision. Four years of very, very hard work has
avoided 30 years of hard work.

~~~
codeisawesome
Thank you for being so open about this. The information helps me a lot. Thanks
again.

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tixocloud
Just because you have a family doesn't mean that you should thrash your
startup ideas. It takes more planning, a deeper commitment to focus on core
business building activities and a more selective criteria on what you will
work on.

I see it as a plus to have a family to take away the stresses of building a
business. It's kept me motivated to hone it on what things I should and should
not be doing. I have found that I have done more than I could ever have done
had I been single.

We're now in a position to start beta testing with customers with a potential
to raising initial funding to identify the right business model.

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aregsarkissian
A lot of advice here is about finding time to work on your product on nights
and weekends. You also need allocate some time during the day for marketing
and communicating with your target customers

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genbit
Ideas worth nothing. Talk to potential customers, try to learn they problem,
see if they like your idea of solving their problem. Use "paper and scissors"
to build quick and dirty prototype — this is possible while having full time
job.

If you idea is too grandiose that is not possible to launch while working full
time — find another, smaller idea. Bootstrap, sell - make money, then you will
have funds for your big idea.

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erdaniels
You could save up enough money to the point which you're comfortable not
accruing more wealth for the time you think it takes to prove the startup out
prior to funding. Finding partners who can do the same can accelerate the time
to an MVP. Also, it's possible to start something on the side while keeping
your day job.

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nickswan
Pick an idea you can work on in the evenings and weekends. This may limit what
idea you choose - but if it is your first attempt at this it would be better
to choose a small well defined problem anyway to get experience of all the fun
of building, marketing and selling something.

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muzani
You can still take a salary with VC funding. That's really the whole point of
seed funding. But there's a balance there. If you're taking much more salary
than your cofounders, you also take much less equity.

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throwawayz9
1: You can work and use your salary to fund your startup 2: You can buy a
startup and extend 3: Save money and move somewhere cheap

