Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job? - jobsandjobs
======
jepper
Not really a startup in the sense of a VC backed multi million dollar company
but three working friends and me have bootstrapped a fitness websites with
science based health advice, mostly free, to basically the largest fitness
related website in the Netherlands. Currently employing people, which i think
still sounds insane for a hobby project.
[https://www.fit.nl](https://www.fit.nl). 700.000 pageviews a month. App, 2
books, system for training and meal schedules etc. One now works full time as
a lead/writer.

As a day job I'm a full time resident of orthopedic surgery. Busy days. I've
done most of the programming of the website (custom theme on wordpress),
product comparison engine and other custom pages. And server admin for
discourse, mattermost etc

Some important findings:

\- You have to care otherwise it becomes a chore. In this case it keeps people
healthy. We give free advice that i think is pretty good, e.g on the forum, I
love that part. The link with the day job is here. Lots of stuff i tell people
during clinic hours applies here as well

\- As its completely different it still feels like a hobby. Learning to do
stuff is fun

\- Clear separation of responsibility, do stuff you are efficient in

\- A ticketing system for jobs, pick up stuff when you have time. Anybody can
add to the ticket list but the list owner decides what comes first.

\- Keeping the tickets bite sized. GIT to deploy, deploy often

\- A time tracking system (Toggle) tracks time spent.

\- Mattermost for private discussions and planning

\- Meetups and fun activities to keep the group focused

\- Managed main server (websynthesis) in case the website goes down and the
other technical guy or me are unavailable. More expensive but less stress this
way.

~~~
kk58
What inspired a doctor to code? I assume that must have an inspiring story

~~~
jepper
Not really. Picked it up as a child, loved programming and tinkering. Had to
choose between computer science and medicine. There are actually lots of
things in common, debugging complex systems, building a mental model,
abstraction, looking up solutions based on certain hints. Orthopedics is a
highly technical field, working with implants, computer surgery, imaging and
such so its very useful. Programming trains your problem solving abilities. I
really believe everybody should have the opportunity to learn to code.

------
deedubaya
I've got two cash flow positive side-projects while maintaining full-time
employment, having a life, wife, and kid.

BreezyPDF - [https://breezypdf.com](https://breezypdf.com) \- Dead simple PDF
generation from URLs. Comes with a rails middleware so all you have to do is
add .pdf to the end of a URL to download a PDF of that URL.

HOALife - [https://hoalife.com](https://hoalife.com) \- A CC&R Inspection and
Enforcement tool for property managers.

~~~
redhale
I love how one of the Breezy testimonials is from HOALife. Way to dog-food!

~~~
deedubaya
Ha, I should probably update those to customers that are less biased

~~~
quickthrower2
You are not the first, you won't be the last :-)

------
polote
That's what I do currently, I'm a full time product manager in a normal
company, and I'm also working as a CTO at a startup, we are 3. Two people are
working full time, and I only work part time (about 30h per week). I do that,
because I like doing multilple things at the same time. But I think it is a
very difficult life.

I can do that because I have no social life and everything is optimized so
that I can work all the time. But I don't think I would recommend that to
everyone.

Benefits are :

* You are never bored

* If one of your job annoys you, you can always balance with the other one

* You have a lot of money, because you have two salaries, but you also don't have the time to buy anything

* And you dont waste time on useless things

Disadvantages:

* No social life

* No time with familly

* No leisures

* Very tired all the time

Honestly having a startup is usually not only something you can focus on only
the night, you need to answer clients during the day, you need to monitor
everything all the time. But if you love working, this is definitely something
that you can enjoy

~~~
bootloop
"Very tired all the time" \- Where I come from (EU) this is the reason why
it's not allowed to work two jobs (>40h) if the employer doesn't approve.

~~~
polote
I'm from France, it is not allowed to work more than 44h per week for a period
of 12 weeks. But honestly it is difficult to set the same bar for everyone

~~~
oceanman888
that is bellow the minimum in japan.

------
ryandrake
Tread carefully. If you’re going to do this, read your current employment
agreement _carefully_ especially the parts about Intellectual Property. Every
medium-to-large company I have worked at has asserted ownership of everything
I build, at work or away from work, using my own equipment, on my own time—it
doesn't matter. If your employer can imagne a conflict of interest (for
example could what you are working on potentially compete with a current _or
future_ business of your employer’s?), you’re screwed. I’ve had to end
involvement with open source projects and home hobby projects because of the
IP threats in my employment agreements. Feel free to take the risk yourself,
personally I don’t feel like fighting a room full of corporate lawyers.

EDIT: jobsandjobs, sorry to have derailed your good Ask HN question but I
thought this was an important and often-overlooked pitfall that people should
be aware of.

~~~
overcast
"asserted ownership of everything I build, at work or away from work, using my
own equipment, on my own time—it doesn't matter"

That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Assuming you're not stealing
technology, or doing it on their time or machines, there is no way a court
would uphold that. If I build a house, or rebuild a car in my off time, they
own that too? Corporations don't own your entire life.

~~~
ssalka
Sadly this is fairly commonplace in IP contracts. Though some companies
provide potential hires with an option to list "own inventions" wherein he/she
can list projects they may continue to develop in their own time and retain
ownership of. Granted, all entries therein are subject to approval by the
company - obviously they won't let you pursue a project that is actually in
competition with their business.

~~~
ryandrake
My understanding of the “list all inventions/projects” activity is that its
purpose is to let the employer know what _past_ projects they can’t grab, but
it is not a way for you to continue working on them while still owning the IP.
Their lawyers will say, “we can’t go after the parts of this project that were
disclosed to us, but we can go after it based on the parts you’ve worked on
_since_ joining us.”

------
dpods
Might not be your typical answer, but I launched an ecommerce store that’s
been profitable since the first month. At first I targeted solo devs without
much digital design skills, but it turns out that blank sketchpads are very
useful to designers and design agencies as well. It’s done well enough where I
continue to run out of each batch of inventory and it’s turned a small profit
as I continue to order large and larger batches of product.

[https://sketchpads.co](https://sketchpads.co)

~~~
redhale
I love these. You should make whiteboard magnets!

~~~
dpods
That’s an interesting idea! I’ll look in to that

------
SimianLogic2
I didn't build one from scratch, but I recently purchased
[https://introcave.com](https://introcave.com) for low 6 figures. Though my
background is more full stack, my current day job is mostly front end. Most of
the product/ux/ui work is done before things hit my desk (agency work), so I
really enjoy being able to run something on the side where I'm making those
decisions.

It's profitable month-to-month, but until it recoups the purchase price I'm
thinking of it as a really expensive hobby. I recently purchased a better
domain ([https://intromaker.com](https://intromaker.com)), and at some point
in the future I'm planning to build a more dynamic render engine and do some
sort of subscription service (less targeted at youtubers and more geared
towards agencies).

~~~
xcubic
May I ask how did you know the website was for sale?

~~~
SimianLogic2
There are brokerages. I read about the codetree sale on HN a few years back
(just google “codetree sale”) and signed up for the FEInternational list.

~~~
imhoguy
Thanks for the good read:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12654277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12654277)

And good luck with your hobby!

------
jmhyer123
I, along with two other co-founders, have bootstrapped a profitable SaaS
startup over the last two years while we all three maintained our day jobs. We
all have families but have put in nights/weekends to get it where it is. I
just made the jump and quit my day job and the other two are just about to do
the same.

In retrospect, it was a much safer way to start a business because it took
much of the uncertainty out of the equation and eliminated the financial
stress. It was possible for us because our startup is a SaaS business, not all
businesses can be bootstrapped or built with only nights and weekend efforts.
I often wished it would go faster and still think we could have been
profitable a year earlier than we were but with time being our biggest
constraint it didn't happen. That was the tradeoff we made for financial
stability. You have to be OK with small successes and slow progress that
evolves into a business/product over time rather than one massive sprint to
get an MVP ready to ship in a couple weeks/months.

~~~
coder543
What kind of SaaS business?

------
fizx
I built bonsai.io/websolr.com while working at Twitter in 2010. I left in
2012, keeping a promise to a co-founder that I'd leave if we hit $1M ARR.

There were definitely a couple months of pager/ops overload where I hit 100hr
workweeks and multiple hundreds of pagers per week. Hypervisor bugs meant that
some tasks were hard to automate, and that automation would stochastically
fail, so I stayed up til 4am watching the logs and correcting issues, then
went back into the office at 10am.

Basically, it was a reasonable hedging strategy against either company's
failure, but given both succeeded, I lost a good chunk of what I would have
made if I was "all in" on either. Plus, it was about as miserable as it
sounds, though I learned a ton.

~~~
shdh
Any insightful takeaways from "watching the logs" and "correcting issues" in
terms of what you would do differently?

~~~
fizx
If you aren't automatically rolling instances frequently, you will inevitably
have some machines that were theoretically cattle but in practice are pets.
(This is much easier today with k8s/mesos)

More generally, when you claim in system design that you have invariants, if
you aren't using automation to enforce your invariants, they will inevitably
be bypassed to your detriment by eager and/or lazy engineers. You will find
this out at the worst possible time.

------
canadapups
I have a finance career, plus I built CanadaPups.com. Very little maintenance
and costs, but lots of fun to tinker and improve it as a hobby. Just letting
it grow on its own as I'm kinda out of ideas of how to kick it up a notch -
suggestions welcome!. [https://canadapups.com](https://canadapups.com)

~~~
javiramos
How did you get the first few customers to achieve enough critical mass to
make website successful?

~~~
canadapups
I needed traffic from the buy-side and sell-side.

On the sell side (breeders), I can just google for new customers! Many dog
breeders have their own websites. I search for dog breeders and then contact
them through their website (either their webform or their published emails).

On the buy-side (people looking for pets), I pay for google ads on certain
keyword searches. As my website became more relevant, the cost of the ads
dropped significantly and I started getting more organic searches. Getting
buy-side is more difficult for me. Once you find your new pet, you don't need
to visit my website anymore, so customer retention is bad... something I need
to work on.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Maybe curated lists or targeted marketing of stuff people might buy for pets?
Maybe training or pet health advice you've collected from experts selling at a
low cost? Just brainstorming here.

------
llcoolv
I think a lot of people who visit those two websites:

[https://www.indiehackers.com/](https://www.indiehackers.com/)

[http://sidehustlehq.com/](http://sidehustlehq.com/)

~~~
joepour
Just want to second, [https://indiehackers.com](https://indiehackers.com) is a
great site!

------
overcast
Spent the better part of two years building a local food and drink promotion
side gig. Building connections, making money, social life, growing photography
skills and traveling for something I'm already doing in my life, eating and
drinking. Cliche as it may be, that's the key, particularly when adding
ANOTHER job on top of your day job. You have to enjoy the shit out of it.

------
hopfog
I built my startup while keeping my job until it was impossible to sustain. I
tried really hard to make it work as long as possible.

At the time I quit my job the startup was profitable and growing really fast.
A few months later we started negotiating an acquisition and closed the deal
after working less than a year on it full-time.

------
Arqu
For what it's worth, it's still work in progress (not really profitable, but
getting there). I've been working on it for more than 5 years now for about 2
hours a day on average, steady. Basically, I spend my "hobby time" working on
it. Evenings, weekends, late nights, wherever I can squeeze some spare time
in. Sometimes it gets hard and frustrating as you would like to push more but
don't have the luxury of going full time on it just yet.

It gets easier to balance with time as you learn how and when to squeeze in
some time to work on it while still maintaining a normal life with job, family
and friends.

------
mcjiggerlog
I built Artpip ([https://artpip.com](https://artpip.com)) whilst working
fulltime. Spent the odd weeknight and some weekends developing it over the
course of a few months, then the same again when I added the pro mode once I
realised it could actually make me some money.

Not sure you could classify it as a startup, but it makes me a few hundred
dollars per month. I'd actually love to grow it more but I'm not sure what the
best direction to take it in is. If anybody has any feedback or feels like
getting involved, feel free to drop me a mail at "tom @ artpip.com"!

~~~
zeptomu
Nice!

How is the legal situation with these paintings? They are from well known
artists (van Gogh, Monet, ...) - is it now possible to sell them because the
artists are dead for a long time - I thought that maybe some descendants hold
the (exclusive) right to sell them, but I may be wrong ...

Good luck with your endeavor.

~~~
mcjiggerlog
They're all in the public domain due to age since the death of the creator.
You can do whatever you like with works in the public domain (yay!).

See the section at the bottom of
[https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_-
_Starry_...](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_-
_Starry_Night_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg) for an example.

------
lee101
I built a high frequency cryptocurrency forecasting system
[https://bitbank.nz](https://bitbank.nz) and few games in my spare time
[http://www.wordsmashing.com](http://www.wordsmashing.com)
[http://bigmultiplayerchess.com](http://bigmultiplayerchess.com)
[http://multiplicationmaster.com](http://multiplicationmaster.com)

hasn't made that much money but allowed me to get paid more at work and tipped
our income over the edge so we could get a mortgage on our first house which
was nice :) great decision and learning experience building products from the
ground up and exciting/grounding interacting with customers who always like to
push the limits of your product :)

I have noticed others who have a lot of job experience coding but not the
business/product experience can find it difficult to prioritise things from a
users point of view and or build reusable/extendable systems by anticipating
how things are going to change in future.

Even if it fails terribly i think its a good learning experience and can work
out in your favour... Word Smashing made some money from ads but $0 from
listing on the android app store :D -$20 on app store ads actually...

~~~
iends
In big multiplayer chess the king/queens are mixed up.

------
karmajunkie
My day job was steady consulting work, but I used that to provide stability
while building a company my partners and I sold last year. It wasn't a huge
exit (in truth my cut barely covered the extra hours I put into it over four
years) and one of these days I'm going to have to write up the history of this
project as a cautionary tale about all the mistakes you can make getting
involved with a startup. But it was mildly profitable, and with better
marketing we probably could have tripled our valuation on exit.

------
chad_strategic
If you are going to try to do this, working remote is the ideal situation.
When working remote I save about 2 or so hours. Traffic, packing a lunch,
office politics, getting dressed, eating breakfast vs. eating breakfast in
front of the computer... etc.

------
patwalls
I run starterstory.com with a full time job and this month it's on track to
make $1,700 revenue.

I actually wrote a blog post about balancing side project and full time job:
[https://starterstory.com/blog/full-time-job-and-full-time-
si...](https://starterstory.com/blog/full-time-job-and-full-time-side-project-
how-i-stay-productive)

Not sure if that's what you're looking for but hope it helps.

------
fsloth
Not me - but, I think one of the prime examples is Warby Parker. At least
according to 'Originals' by Adam Grant.

Mr. Grant scoffed at the founders meekness at not going full ahead and passed
an opportunity to invest. After WP became successful Mr. Grant realized he had
no idea how to gauge peoples tendency to succeed - which prompted him to write
the book. Which is an excellent read.

------
falco925
I built stratascratch.com working a full-time job and teaching at a university
1-2x a week in the evenings. The idea came from the amount of headaches and
inefficiencies I experienced trying to teach non-technical students how to
code. I built a platform that made my life easier. It's fairly profitable but
not at a scale where I can quit my day job. Since I don't have much free time,
I have to hire several freelancers to help with product improvements and
sales.

For the record, I don't charge my students to use the platform :P

------
purplezooey
I built a nice shed while keeping my day job. Does that count?

~~~
xutopia
If it increases the value of your house that's good in itself. For fun I did a
side project while my friend built a new deck for his cottage. His cottage
increased value about the same amount that I sold my side project for.

------
cphills
Echoing what many have mentioned in this thread. Read your employment
agreement for mentions of Intellectual Property, inventors clause, etc. I work
full-time and I am launching a side business, but I have a licensing agreement
in place with my employer that clearly states my ownership of my businesses IP
in exchange for a free license of the product. There is a lot of grey area in
employment agreements. Even if there isn't anything that is clearly stated
(from your understanding) that would cause issues, it is up to debate in the
court of law. The best plan of action is to speak with a lawyer. It took me
six months and multiple revisions to my licensing agreement before it was
signed, but I can now sleep better at night and launch my business!

------
smarri
I run a non-profit outside of my day job. Whilst not a startup in the sense
you are probably asking about, there are many parallels. Even though we are
non profit we still require well into 6 figures per year to operate and
deliver on our charitable purpose. This requires us to pitch for funding at
large corporates and investors. We have a big team of enthusiastic people
working on the charity, without any scope for renumeration, so the vision has
to be compelling. We have to manage regulation, risk, and financial standards.
It takes a lot of time. But it's well worth it. You could always consider a
'non profit startup' if you are interested in making an impact other than
financial. Best of luck.

------
wilsmex
Bootstrapped [https://artcall.org](https://artcall.org) and trying to gain
traction on [https://ezzl.art](https://ezzl.art) while employed full time
elsewhere.

~~~
notJim
FYI, I cannot scroll down on on artcall.org.

~~~
wilsmex
Oh strange, can’t reproduce. Are you on mobile or desktop? Browser?

~~~
neetdavid
Same for me on Chrome. There's a 'mousewheel' event listener attached to the
window that is calling preventDefault()

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
This absolutely infuriates me to the point where I'm struggling to remain
civil. My blood instantly began boiling after reading that sentence.

Why the @#$% does some web designer think it's a good idea to disable
mousewheel scrolling?! What does this accomplish? What feature do you gain?
What was the goal?

I just can't for the life of me grok what would be going through someone's
brain when they decide "Hey, you know what would make this page better?
Disabling scrolling with your mouse wheel!"

EDIT: Maybe the intent was to do something else, like implementing smooth
scrolling in JavaScript, and it's not working properly. But if that's the
case, the answer is that web devs need to stop trying to mess with scrolling.
Implementations rarely work correctly in every browser and it just ruins the
UX. Just stop messing with scrolling!

~~~
wilsmex
In this case it's a bug, as I'm not trying to 'disable' the mouse, but track
scrolling and then make the menu 'stick' to the header when the user scrolls
down the page. A common design pattern which increases usability quite a bit.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
Isn't that usually done with CSS?

------
caspervonb
Not a start up per se, but my Medium blog is fairly profitable, ~2k on a good
month.

~~~
wyldfire
Can't tell if you're serious or not. Is there a way for people to monetize
their Medium blogs? If so, what's yours about?

~~~
caspervonb
Been a partner for about a year now, which pays you an undisclosed cut of the
members fee from those that engage with your content (meaning claps).

Mine is about, uhm, me being a disillusioned 30 year old developer hating how
things are done now? Rants like this [https://medium.com/commitlog/how-to-
design-for-the-modern-we...](https://medium.com/commitlog/how-to-design-for-
the-modern-web-52eaa926bae2) tend to alright.

Throwing in an amazon link when its appropriate, or funny in the above case
doesn't hurt either. Kinda got an on-going thing with always pushing K&R
books.

------
Schwolop
With a founding team of six for a hardware startup, we couldn't all be paid
without going bust, so the best thing was for most of us to keep jobs and
accept the reduced speed of development. I've been working one or two evenings
a week for 4 years, totalling 1500+ hours, which is close enough to a full-
time year now.

As the software guy, I also found I spent much of the rest of the week
subconsciously thinking through issues and solutions anyway, so by the time I
did get that six or so hours to code I was pretty damn productive.

------
dazhbog
We had a different turn of events in our case. Me and my co-founder we were
working on the startup, while on our full-time jobs, and we got some grants
from governments to allow us to quit and persuit it full time. This was 4
years ago and we are still going strong with sales and grants. Never
underestimate the opportunities for free money! Governments, councils,
schemes, all have projections, agentas and budgets and if your startup aligns
with them you can get 10k to 150k usd just by writing a few proposals..

~~~
shdh
Can you post some sources to this information?

~~~
dazhbog
Dont have any guide tbh, it is all luck and prercistence. Just to give you an
idea, we apply to multiple grants every 1-2 weeks from websites like
younoodle, f6s and we keep an spreadsheet with all the deadlines of each grant
(that might have their own website). All this while doing a hardware product
and running the baby/startup.

Talking with people, the first barrier we see is that people think they _can
't get or don't deserve grants_. They give excuses like, "Oh I never been to
country X", "I'm not a resident there", "It's just an idea", etc etc.

Most grants will ask you to go to country X, incorporate there in some cases
(to attract talent), or get involved and help the ecosystem of that region.
For others you just submit a proposal with milestones and you have check,
presentations and writeups (and ultimately you do the things you promised).

Some examples of grants are, startupInsertXCountry (e.g. StartupChile,
StartupPeru, Startup Puerto Rico - P18), LaunchKC (Kansas City), EU H2020
(hard) but also H2020 sub-programs that got H2020 funding for a cause and pass
it on to startups as a challenge (robotics challenges, Big-data challenges),
HotDesQ (AUS), and many many many more countries that want to be like Silicon
Valey)

Hope this helps!

------
beardface
Whether or not it will be profitable is yet to be seen, but I am in the
process of doing this.

As has already been mentioned, make sure the IP is in your name. My employment
contract is one of those generic 'everything you think is ours' kind of
affairs. I don't know if it would hold up in court but wanted at least some
security. I'm in the UK, so this may not be appropriate to where you are.

After I proved the idea will work but before I started building the product
for real, I went to a solicitor (lawyer) and explained my situation. They draw
up a Deed of Understanding and Assignment. This is a document that gives scope
to the work and states that my employer has no claim to any work inside that
scope. My employer (eventually) signed it, as did I, and a witness. It wasn't
free, but I feel safer having it.

Even if you're building a product that won't compete with your day job work,
do all you can to make sure your employer can't claim it. If you do start
making profit and your employer isn't (or is just greedy), it's not outside
the realm of possibility that they could find out and claim all rights to it.
I also don't see why this couldn't happen after you've left your job, if you
built the product while employed.

If you think it's going to go somewhere, speak to a lawyer as soon as you can.

------
dsizemore
Unfortunately it's not profitable and I'm not even sure I'd call it a
"startup" but I do have a day job and enjoy building web apps in my free time.
My most recent project is [http://www.famsnap.com](http://www.famsnap.com). I
built it after becoming frustrated with the process of finding a photographer
to take family photos while we were on vacation.

I have around 300 members currently but it has been slow growth. Every
photographer I've told loves the idea but there's no place to really promote
as posting on Facebook groups or forums is seen as spam and deleted. So I'll
keep on growing slowly I guess using Instagram to contact photographers and
see where I am in a few years.

------
walkingolof
Sort of, I consulted in the day time and built my company in the evenings,
after 3-4 years I switched to full time on my company, 6 years after that I
made an exit.

While it worked for me, it came at a cost and I did not have a family at the
time or any other obligations.

------
patd
I would call it a profitable side-project rather than a startup but I've built
a price comparison browser extension :
[http://www.shoptimate.com](http://www.shoptimate.com)

I'm currently busy launching a SaaS tool
[http://blockedby.com](http://blockedby.com) but having two small children, a
full time job and Shoptimate.com limits the time I can spend on this.

~~~
hpagey
Whats the pain point that "blocked by" is trying to solve? Let's say the
google analytics or marketo munchkin scripts are blocked by Ad Blocker, what's
the marketing team supposed to do?

~~~
krageon
Seeing as the page mentions "help you solve it", they will help them bypass
the filter rules that exist. Deeply unethical IMO, but without adversaries I
guess things wouldn't be as interesting as they are today.

------
joepour
My brother and I built
TinyTracker([https://tinytracker.co](https://tinytracker.co)) after getting
frustrated with Jira. We're not charging yet but we have a handful of
businesses happily using it who (I hope) will come on as fully-paying
customers once we get out of beta.

------
jotm
I work full time and get/test/ship washer/dryer/dishwasher spare parts in my,
uh, spare time. It's profitable at 2000 pounds/month, and can go much, much
higher. Fuck this shit because no one should just work 6-8 24/7.

~~~
is_true
You buy and sell spare parts?

------
Insanity
Might be easier to combine a day job with freelancing rather than having a
startup.

~~~
imhoguy
It depends, serious freelancing often requires some kind
availability/responsiveness within business hours which may be tough with
full-time day job. Of course the same applies to any high touch customer
startup too.

~~~
33degrees
Yes, I tried doing this for a while and it’s frustrating for everyone.

------
rman666
Based on my experience, I think it is a extremely difficult thing to do!

