
Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Using Wage Earnings to Support a New Business (2012) [pdf] - dotluis
http://www.frbatlanta.org/documents/news/conferences/13rdc/s2_p1_new_firms_Perez.pdf
======
AndrewKemendo
I'm mixed on this.

I have a full time job and have a growing side business that I am going to be
transitioning to my full time job in December.

On the one hand it is critical for myself and my family to have income while
we bootstrap. Our business is in the position where we need money to go full
time but can't get money till we are able to devote full time effort to it -
and even then it's not a guarantee that we will make enough in the first few
months to sustain my family and my co-founders families until we have a market
breakthrough.

Oh the flip side, not only is your life insane but nobody really wants to
touch you because you can't be 100% devoted right then. Investors don't like
part-time people, partners don't like part time people and you have a hard
time recruiting people to work part time on the side. Not only that but there
is a constant nagging feeling in the back of your head that "you're late to
the party" and some competitor is going to eat your lunch simply by putting in
more hours.

So there are goods and bads and I think the answer is that it depends on your
life situation and what you are trying to build.

~~~
tieTYT
> I have a full time job and have a growing side business that I am going to
> be transitioning to my full time job in December.

Are you allowed to do that? Every full time job offer I've read forbids
outside work.

~~~
vonmoltke
I have not personally seen a contract provision or company policy that was a
blanket prohibition on outside work.

~~~
tieTYT
Odd, I literally just saw one that did exactly that. It even forbade "outside
activity" and I had to ask WTH that meant.

~~~
vonmoltke
I have seen some indications[1] that such a clause may be illegal.

[1] [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/off-duty-conduct-
empl...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/off-duty-conduct-employee-
rights-33590.html)

------
otakucode
As day jobs expand and expand, expecting more and more hours worked for less
and less pay, and carrying a cell phone and checking email 24 hours a day, it
seems quite implausible that maintaining a day job and ANYTHING else, whether
it be a hobby or a fledgeling company, is not a wise move.

~~~
josephschmoe
This depends a lot on your job. If you work as a software engineer, it's
likely that you have sufficient control and freedom to work on side projects.

It's still brutal though - 60 hour weeks are insane, especially when you do
them continuously. It can also take _years_ and likely multiple projects
before you succeed.

~~~
humanrebar
And you'd need a fairly mundane day job so your problem solving circuits
aren't perpetually exhausted.

~~~
vonmoltke
That has been one of my problems. I frequently come home so drained that I
don't have much capacity left for the day. That exacerbates my
motivation/procrastination problems.

~~~
kekket
Get up early. You have to make sure to do the important thing first in the
morning and chip away at it day by day. This is very hard, but still possible
by slowly building up a routine (even if your an 'owl'). Spend your best
brain-time on your own stuff, get to work and try to manage the dayjob with
the leftovers. Be a B player, fuck them.

------
ChrisNorstrom
It's very do-able. I work 30-40 hours a week at a Law Firm (weekdays) + Target
retail store (weekends). My little mini business is selling my inventions and
products at [http://ChrisNorstrom.com/shop](http://ChrisNorstrom.com/shop) .
Only 5 are up right now with 4 new ones being added for the Holiday Season and
another 2 for Spring next year.

A day job allowed me to experiment and survive failures. I've had 7 products
fail in the prototyping phase (costing me at least a grand) and 5 were
successful. The simple ones are the ones that succeeded. What people don't
realize is that it can take hundreds of dollars of experimenting with
materials and suppliers to get even the simplest product just right. Selling
my calendar alone took $7,000 in materials/packing/shipping/bulk orders. If
it's defective you can lose thousands on the refund costs to all your
customers.

● 1.5 years ago = I had 1 sale every month from ebay.

● Today = I have orders from Amazon, Etsy, Ebay, and my website come in 2-10
times a day, every day.

● I started with simple products and am expanding to Glass lamps, pebble
imbedded rubber mats for showers and tubs, glass cube wall planters, and a
"20" tall Leaning Tower of Piza Lamp". (I'm starting to take more risks with
more profitable but harder to make products)

It's growing slowly but growing none-the-less. The more money I make at my day
jobs the more risk I can afford to take with my prototypes.

(DO NOT underestimate the amount of space a small etsy/ebay/estore business
will take up in your home. Our entire basement is dedicated to boxes, stock,
and shipping supplies)

------
hudibras
A bit off topic, but one of my favorite parts of any social science paper is
when the authors describe how they developed the dataset. In this case, it's a
clever linking of tax forms, Census Bureau surveys of business owners, and
state unemployment insurance databases.

It's a neat solution that the authors are justifiably proud of. But since it's
considered passé to talk about your data too much at the expense of your
results, it only gets a couple pages (pages 9-10) of the paper even though I'm
sure they spent many man-months compiling and cleaning up the data.

------
kjs3
I've done this. It can work, but it's a huge commitment. YMMV.

Protip: make sure you understand (as in, have your own employment law lawyer
explain, not rely on what you think, or what HR tells you) _exactly_ what any
explicit or implied employment contract says about this. This will prevent any
number of more or less unpleasant surprises down the road.

------
zhte415
Use wage earnings to support an idea.

Not to support a trading, or self-registered, business.

Make the clarification distinct.

~~~
obulpathi
True. It would probably kill to do full time job and work on side business as
well.

~~~
mindcrime
Plenty of people work full-time and also work on a side business. I'm doing it
right now, myself. Yeah, it's tough, but you do what you have to do.

~~~
kjs3
According to the US BLS, almost 5% of the employed workforce has more than one
job. Of course, the _vast_ majority of those aren't working a white collar job
while pursuing their start-up dream on the side...

------
enraged_camel
The issue I have is that my day job is fairly demanding, and by the time I get
home my brain is so fried that the last thing I want is to do even more work.
And even if I find it in myself to do it, the quality I put out tends to be...
meh.

The reason I want to quit is to force myself to abandon the safety net of a
stable day job. I have enough saved up where I can go jobless for a year or
so, which should be sufficient time to devote my full energy to ideas. In the
end, even if things don't work out, I suspect that my batteries will be
recharged and I'll be ready to go back to a steady day job.

Maybe I'm just horribly wrong, though. One way to find out, right? :)

------
radnam
I think a blanket statement like the title of the article should be a taken
with a pinch of salt. There a plethora of factors that come into play, e.g.,
what kind of day job you are working at? Do you have a family to support? What
kind of new business ideas are you exploring?

Personally, I think it is really hard to do justice to either your fledgling
business or your day job when you try to do both. Especially when you have a
kids.

------
blutoot
"Having recent wage and salary income in the same industry as the non-employer
business has a large and positive impact on the likelihood of transit- ing to
being a non-employer business." \- isn't this capturing the typical Silicon
Valley story?

------
mmanfrin
Questions to those of you who have done this: how do you deal with exhaustion
keeping you from working on side projects after work? I have a bunch of ideas
I want to try to work on, but I never seem to have the will to do them when I
get home.

~~~
tieTYT
Become really good at breaking down tasks into 15-30 minute increments and
work on at least one increment per day. You may not get much done per day, but
over time you will.

------
angersock
Notice that all of the top-level comments so far on this are basically "Don't
try and be uppity and make your own business at the same time as you hold a
job." In many cases, sure, but it's interesting to see such an anti-Labor
position here.

We're all being bought and enslaved, bit by bit, paycheck by paycheck. Don't
fight the system, the company cares about you (lol).

~~~
grayclhn
I think you're reading into it. I read the comments as "straighten this out
early so you're not sued later."

edit: and the replies to "I'm tired after work" seem to be "do your own stuff
first and be tired at work!"

