
Ask HN: Leaving my job to boostrap my projects. Advice? - welpwelp
Hello HN! I&#x27;ve decided to quit my job to boostrap my projects à la IndieHackers. I don&#x27;t want to raise money and I only have a few $k. My plan is to build everything myself, using a stack such as Python&#x2F;Django + HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JavaScript + eventually iOS, and the initial goal after validating my MVPs is to become &quot;ramen profitable.&quot;<p>Levels has been greatly inspiring to me and I&#x27;ve read most of his blog and work about NomadList. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;levelsio<p>I&#x27;m going to go with the flow and figure out and learn things as I go, so my question is whether there are any advice you can think of (release on Tuesday?) that could possibly save me time, money, and mistakes.<p>Let me know if knowing what the projects are about, but they&#x27;re basically simple services with niche userbases (e.g: Squarespace for photographers and Slack for gyms)<p>Thank you HN!
======
tiborsaas
> I've decided to quit my job to boostrap my projects à la IndieHackers.

I did this and it was fun and everything, but I never made a single cent. I
did grow my personal network though :) If you value learning from others, keep
your job and only quit if you make at least 50 to 75% of your salary AND you
see constant growth.

> using a stack such as Python/Django + HTML/CSS/JavaScript + eventually iOS

Another red flag. Technology doesn't matter and the fact that you mention this
instead of business validation you should think twice before making such a
commitment.

EDIT: I forgot to add that the technology part is at most 10-15% of it. The
rest is boring marketing, tons of spreadsheets, Google, Google, Google,
Email^n, more spreadsheets and business operations if you are lucky.

~~~
marktangotango
>> Another red flag. Technology doesn't matter and the fact that you mention
this instead of business validation you should think twice before making such
a commitment.

This is a very, very true. I also did this, quit to work on a side project for
about 8 months (2008). I wrote a lot of code, but in the end the project had a
couple of hard problems and the market was a small number of large
corporations. When I finally realized this, and ran the numbers, I discovered
my folly. That and I found myself web surfing all day instead of coding. Went
back to work.

Next project (2011) I also didn't validate the market, but kept working, it
never launched. For my third project (2016) I launched but didn't validate the
market either.

What have I learned? Validate the $#@!ing market before writing a line of
code! I'm still trying to figure out how to do this however.

~~~
3pt14159
Talk to clients first. Say "what's are some problems that are stopping you
from making money, I want to help you solve them and I'll only bill you if it
works". You don't have to say that to too many companies before you find a
problem that isn't just unique to them.

~~~
fapjacks
Ah this is a very good idea. I had always wondered (even as someone that's
started a couple of businesses before) what would be some practical,
efficient, useful and free (beer) ways to probe for market opportunities, and
this seems like an excellent method.

------
swalsh
I'm in a similar boat, I left my job a few days ago. I have a substantial
savings though, and i'm actively looking for contract work.

I've spent 10 years trying to get side projects off the ground while staying
employed, each time I've gotten a little bit closer to something, but not
quite there. Here's what I've learned.

1\. Tech doesn't matter, the value you're creating does. If you build
something no one is using, who cares what powered it? You should use what
you're already most productive in.

2\. You need to start selling before you have a product, it should influence
your product, or help you avoid building something useless.

3\. If you want to do everything yourself you should choose your idea based on
what you're capable of. In terms of sales I had a lot of B2B ideas, but I
found i've been more successful with paid ads and SEO. Doesn't mean that cold
calling, and networking are not effective, but it's not my personal strength.
Building a business is hard enough, ramping up new skills probably isn't
something you have time for.

4\. You can create a market, or you can compete in an existing market. If you
have to create demand, it's going to take a lot longer than your planning for.

5\. Getting people to pay for stuff is REALLY HARD, you should talk to people.
The idea i'm working on now came after hours of talking to potential
customers, I didn't write a line of code until I fully vetted the idea.

/just where i'm at right now. Hope it helps.

~~~
erjjones
> 2\. You need to start selling before you have a product, it should influence
> your product, or help you avoid building something useless.

This is the best advice and to push it further I would say you need to have a
customer ready to go and willing to work with you.

6\. YOLO so go for it. You don't want to be 80 years old looking back and
thinking I wish I would have.

~~~
GFischer
Second that advice. In my specific case, I had a customer very interested in
using my product for a very interesting use case I hadn't thought of, and it
only took one pitch (and it was basically cold calling, although we did use
connections to open that door).

However, because I failed to deliver on time, I've lost the opportunity to
strike while the fire was hot and key stakeholders went on vacation (I do
expect to rekindle interest once we're ready, but I totally blew my personal
deadlines).

------
BugsJustFindMe
Hi there. Fellow job quitter here, (though for extremely long vacation rather
than bootstrapping). A lot of people in this thread are telling you not to
quit your job because they are scared of not having "a long runway". I'm going
to tell you about the other side of that.

Understand how much it actually costs to live for a year. In reality it
doesn't cost all that much. You can live comfortably in Boston or Paris, not
cheap cities, with loads of extra traveling to keep yourself happy, for less
than $20k/year without resorting to sleeping on couches or in your parents'
basement. If you cut out expensive traveling, the truth is that reasonable
rent and healthy food aren't _that_ expensive.

Talk to your current employer before quitting. If they are happy with you now,
they will most likely be happy to re-hire you in 7-12 months or however long
when things don't work out as planned. Don't say that you're quitting. Say
that you're leaving to try to start a business and that if it fails you'd love
to come back. If the people who are currently happy with you and who matter
aren't still at CompanyX in Y months, plan now to hit those people up directly
at whatever their CompanyZs when things don't work out as planned. But ask now
before you quit.

Get a gym membership and use it at least 3 days per week.

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
One more thing. Remember that the cost of doing this is not just your cost of
living for the duration. You also lose all of the salary+benefits that you
would have made. Loss of continued earnings can have a big impact on
retirement investment accounts long term. Prepare yourself psychologically for
that reality with a quick lifetime opportunity cost calculation now.

~~~
daveguy
A quick "lifetime" opportunity cost is a bit misleading. A quick 1-2 year
opportunity cost (but realize part of that difference is being able to invest
that 1-2 years of savings). You will want to re-evaluate in a year anyway to
see if you are accomplishing what you set out to accomplish. If not, you can
get back into the workforce with a good story to tell.

Edit: Just realized you only have a few $k

Do not do this on only a few $k. You need enough to live on while you try.
Also the opportunity cost includes _using your savings_ so what that would
have been invested really is a lifetime opportunity cost.

If you are going to do it with just a few $k at least get rid of as many
subscriptions as you can (gym, or better running shoes, and low bandwidth
internet are probably needed, but netflix, hulu, cable are not). Then
calculate how many months you can live on savings. If you don't already keep
good books it will probably take a few months to figure this out.

------
xenopticon
1\. Don't quit your job if you can't live off savings for at least a year.
Having a job allows you to have a safe base to experiment ideas without the
burden of making profit.

2\. This is business, forget about the tech stack you are using or finding the
perfect tool. Your main goal is to create value and make someone's life
easier. My advice is to use the tools you are most familiar with, this will
allow you to be productive without worrying about things like "which chart
library is the best for Angular 2 RC 5". There are successful business that
started out with a spreadsheet.

3\. Be aware of survivorship bias. While Levels apparently succeeded
bootstrapping many of his businesses (and I think he did), there are hundreds
of other people that you'll never hear the name of who failed miserably and
wasted many keystrokes on launching a failed product.

4\. "Perfect is the enemy of good". Ship things fast and don't be afraid of
doing things that don't scale like processing payment, hard coding a few
things (if you know what you're doing) and even calling users to get a
feedback on your product.

~~~
porpoisemonkey
About #1... If you're going to work in the same field while trying to start a
company it's important to have your employment contract reviewed by an
attorney. Intellectual property rights can become contentious if your business
starts making money.

~~~
welpwelp
I see, thank you. This is another reason why quitting my job makes this
easier.

------
tonylemesmer
Generate income first then quit your job. If you don't have revenue coming
from your products, you'll spend most of your time trying to do that. And
note, that isn't coding or product development its advertising.

Before I started contracting I changed jobs to ease my work / life situation.
Early finish at work and shorter commute allowed me to do side projects. After
1 year I'm now starting to launch some of the projects and still not
generating revenue yet.

Set yourself goals and hit them, every month. Then quit.

~~~
chrisabrams
I'd second this. The stress level between a profitable / breakeven setup vs
one that is not is quite large.

------
ghettosoak
Almost 2 years ago, I quit my cushy dev job at an ad agency to do just this. I
was bored to tears, and the thought of the work that really interested me
languishing at home while I hacked away on yet another promotional website
drove me batty.

I got lucky and was able to live rent free for a few months, sleeping in guest
rooms and couches while I travelled / hacked around the midwest. Living is
expensive, make sure you have things budgeted properly. It’ll save a lot of
unpleasant surprise down the road.

Unless you’re building something that’s immediately profitable, you will take
on outside work. But that’s okay – you now get to decide what you work on.

Don’t expect anyone to understand your path. Sure, you’ll get the few pats on
the back for being ‘courageous’, but those closest to you will think you’re
nuts. If you have a girlfriend / wife, this adds a significant stressor to
your relationship.

People like Levels make this lifestyle look easy. It’s not. ‘Ramen profitable’
has the same romantic appeal as a ‘starving artist’, but when you’ve got
$54.20 in your bank account to pay 7k in bills that were due last month, and
no money coming in; it loses a bit of its lustre.

This life is hard. It is often lonely. But if you play your cards right, it is
fun. I unequivocally have the coolest job in the world – and I don’t regret a
step I’ve taken.

Who dares, wins.

~~~
shinamee
I really love your facts, knowing that the journey wont be easy but its all
about the things you want in life and you also have to learn to enjoy the
process

------
bshimmin
_I 've decided to quit my job ... and I only have a few $k_

I don't know the specifics of your situation, but this seems like a really bad
plan. Usually when I advise people who are about to start contracting, I tell
them they should have 3 to 6 months of rent before they start; contracting is
much more of a sure thing than building Slack for dogs.

~~~
aaronhoffman
Yes, bootstrap at night while paying the bills during the day. As your side
project starts to make money, contract less.

------
soneca
I believe superniche is good.

If you dont hate your job, I would suggest you to stay in your job until you
validate your idea. It allows you to keep earning money while you are not
actually building anything (validate an idea is not a fulltime job). And also
it helps to keep you in the right mental state that your first idea most
certainly isnt the right idea.

If you quit your job with an idea in mind and the plan of validating it then
executing, it will be much harder to change or even discard this idea ("this
idea is why I quit my job afterall!").

Validate your idea (with or without a MVP) before quitting your job. That's my
two cents

~~~
welpwelp
Thank you for your reply! I have tried to keep my job, but working a 10am/7pm
job with a 90mn commute everyday left me with only the weekends to work on
something else. Also it's become harder and harder to get up everyday to spend
the day working on something that does not wholeheartedly passionates me.
Hence the decision to quit.

~~~
owebmaster
Work in your side-project in a regular basis, 10am/7pm. You are always in
front of a computer, anyways.

Don't throw away a comfortable situation thinking that you are running after a
dream because you can finish without both of them (and this happen with the
most of us). I'm much more happy now that I found another good job than when I
left the last one to become a digital nomad.

~~~
porpoisemonkey
Most employment contracts have clauses to the effect of "anything created
using company tools or company time is owned by the company". If there isn't a
clear dilineation between your work hours, work location and equipment you
could get into a contentious situation. (I'm not an attorney but I recently
consulted with one for this exact reason.)

------
hluska
Lots of people are pointing out that you have focused too much on your stack.
Don't be dismayed by that feedback - it is incredibly common, especially among
the sorts of people who are skilled enough to bootstrap a software company.

That said, don't ignore the message behind that. At this point, the only
important thing is to build a product that a few people absolutely love. This
product has to solve a problem so acute that those people are willing to pay
for it.

That is a marketing problem, so it is going to take some different skills.
You're going to need to learn how to go out and find users. You are going to
have to learn how to pick out problems that are small enough for you to solve,
yet big enough to earn a living off of. And, you are going to have to learn to
kill off your emotional attachment to your product.

Those are tough problems and they tend to require significant personal growth.

I have been guilty of jumping into businesses too quickly, so I understand
your zeal. Without knowing more about your life, it's hard for me to say
whether a few thousand dollars is enough to survive on. So, let me frame my
last point as a question.

If you quit your job today and did not make any revenue at all, how many
months are you away from being homeless??

Sometimes, when you're excited about a vision, it is easy to come up with
conservative estimates of, say, $1500 of monthly recurring revenue in four
months. That is a big mistake, especially amongst newer founders. With
products like ours, the only truly conservative estimate is that you will make
$0.

I don't know if I would put that in a pitch deck though...:)

Anyways, best of luck and have fun. You caught the bug!! I hope that you have
an immense amount of success and when you do, I look forward to reading about
you on Indiehackers!

------
Kiro
I think you should become ramen profitable before quitting your job. When I
quit my side-business was doing $1 million in revenue. I only quit because the
work load from customer support had become impossible to deal with on evenings
and weekends.

~~~
kowdermeister
Oh wow, what industry / service you did as a side project?

I can't imagine keeping my job once I start to make more on the side than
doing something full time. Maybe there are that cool places to work, but I
haven't seen any so far :)

~~~
Kiro
I don't want to out myself but it's a boring business which is tailored to a
very specific local market. Think legal stuff that only applies to a specific
country.

One of the reasons I didn't quit earlier was because I loved my old job so
much, the company was exploding and I was a key player. I also had nice stock
options (with pre-emption).

------
dutchbrit
Launch as soon as possible/keep your first version as simple as possible
(proof of concept). You might think, ah, but I need that cool feature, bla bla
bla. It might be a cool feature, but is it essential for your product to
simply work?

Listen to feedback. Keep everything bite sized & keep releasing new features
along the way. Don't let people find your product, but approach your potential
customers.

Allow them to take your product for a test drive & listen to there needs &
frustrations. Focus on satisfying your customers & fulfilling their needs.

Keep building your network. You can build the best product out there, but it's
useless without users.

Good luck, and more importantly, have fun! ;)

------
sharemywin
It's kinda messed up but I hired a contractor to build my site(even though I'm
a developer) I built the database, come up with a spec for what I wanted and
found someone for 20/hrs a week. We made a list of things to get done for the
week. Used a hosted repository to check in code deployed it to a shared host.
He would email me what he got accomplished each day. I would work on things he
got stuck on. I payed him 1/7 what I get paid, so I it was a good trade in
hours.

\--->>>>But it's much _, much_ more important to find some initial users.

~~~
marktangotango
I've often thought about doing this. How did you find the developer? How did
it work out for you in the end?

~~~
sudshekhar
Sorry for hijacking this.

I have some free time available and am based out of India. If you have some
immediate requirements, are happy to pay a decent rate and have interesting
work, drop me a mail (in profile). Would be glad to talk.

~~~
marktangotango
I don't have anything currently, sorry. Kudos to you for taking the
oppurtunity to ask :)

------
jasonkester
It sounds like you've missed a key piece of advice somewhere along the way:
Don't quit your day job until you have something replacing its income.

I live off the profits of a few bootstrapped SaaS products. It took six years
before I was bringing in enough to comfortably live on.

If it's not too late, switch the "build a product" and "quit my job" steps
around into the correct order.

~~~
quakenul
Mind sharing those products?

~~~
ice109
check his profile

------
jaxn
Spend at least one hour every day on sales. Starting now.

Coding is the easy (and natural) part. In my experience, sales has been harder
than I expected. Even when people love the product.

------
3pt14159
My advice is to not build Slack for Gyms, build XXX for everyone and go to
market with an early niche that finds your software useful. Why limit
yourself? Only other advice is to find clients that both have money and have
an obvious problem. Don't try to sell to visible companies that you interact
with all the time like a little restaurant. They don't have the income to
support you. That military contractor that insecure, out of date site that
looks embarrassing _they_ are your target market. They don't bat at eye at a
$10k invoice if it helps them make more income.

------
SQL2219
Lower your overhead. Reduce your rent - $0 would be ideal, if you have a car,
consider selling it or replace it with a super cheap one. I bootstrapped for
10 years, and I did make some money along the way. BUT, I spent too long
trying to make it work. Make sure you don't hang on too long. Give yourself a
deadline for when this thing should be self-sustaining. Understand UPFRONT
that taxes are going to suck up every penny you have. You are no longer a W2
employee, make sure you understand the difference taxes have on a business
owner and a W2 employee.

------
sahrizv
Context: I quit my job in June 2016 to take a break from my career and among
other things, build a product end to end. Money has run out now but passion
hasn't and I'm close to first launch. I'm in Bangalore so I'm able to keep
burn rate below $400/month.

Advice: I'd say go with the tech you know(exceptions only apply if your core
differentiator is technological superiority, but that's rare). You'll have
full days to yourself, so separate work time from leisure time, do physical
exercise, be in touch with friends, don't reveal your plans/progress to many
people, involve target users as soon as possible(most important). Lastly,
enjoy the ride!

------
lefstathiou
You move a mountain one stone at a time. I strongly recommend that you find a
way to create structure for yourself and make (meaningful) bit of progress
coding daily. Set goals and deadlines early and measure yourself against them.
You're on the clock (limited cash to burn through) so it's important that you
avoid rabbit hole ideas and "fail quickly". Good luck and send HN your work
for us to test out and provide feedback.

~~~
welpwelp
I like that idea and will keep you updated with progress. Thank you!

~~~
inimino
The fact that you are replying to the comments about how to make progress and
keep coding, while not replying to some of the other kind of comments, is
actually the biggest red flag. Coding is _not_ going to be your biggest
problem.

Of course, it's possible you'll get lost in the weeds of some framework or
scaling something that you don't need. I can tell from your replies that you
get this and you understand you have to ship. Let's assume you got that
covered.

The real danger is that you will ship, and only then you will discover nobody
wants to pay for what you built. From your pattern of replies, I suspect this
is what is going to bite you, and it's why you shouldn't start with code at
all and you shouldn't have any expectation of finding revenue before your
savings run out.

Anyway, as others have said, whether you take the excellent advice here or
not, either way you will learn a lot by trying!

~~~
welpwelp
I'm actually spending a few days to build tools to validate an idea, and not
building even an MVP yet. Thank you for your feedback!

------
traviswingo
First of all, congratulations! This is a big step (albeit a little scary), but
it's the kind of step you'll never look back and regret.

I quit my job about a year ago to pursue my startup. It didn't work out, but I
don't regret it.

I think the biggest thing that I messed up is truly underestimating my
expenses. Make sure you budget (on paper, not just in your head :)) for
"miscellaneous" expenses. When bootstrapping a project, it's really easy to
say "woah, this really is valuable, I'll just put it on my high interest
credit card because I'll be able to pay it off in a couple months with my cash
flow." I made the mistake of looking at what it took for me to live and pay my
bills, and severely underestimated all those little "misc." expenses that show
up when bootstrapping a project.

Oh, and for what it's worth, the company I quit to work on my project full-
time hired me back with open arms and a raise :). So don't worry too much
about quitting, people understand and support your decisions more than you
might think!

Good luck!

------
dlss
> and the initial goal after validating my MVPs

Validate _before_ building an MVP.

See: [https://steveblank.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/customer-
deve...](https://steveblank.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/customer-
development.jpg) \-- company building happens at the end, not at the start.

His book:
[https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0989200507](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0989200507)

------
tylercubell
My advice for someone at your stage is not to come up with the idea yourself.
Unless you're an expert in the industry you're building your business in, it's
more likely than not that your idea isn't as great as you think it is.

Your best bet is to work backwards. By that I mean interview users first
(preferably in a low-competition niche), find out what their needs are
(preferably a business need that they're willing to pay you money for), and
then build a product to satisfy those needs (as fast as possible with a well-
tested and reliable stack). Don't fall into the trap of building a product
nobody cares about and then trying and failing to find an audience for it. I
made this mistake and it was painful.

------
Cypher
Jerry, this is your landlord speaking: please don't quit your job!

------
estefan
Don't quit. Validate your idea _first_ , then implement it.

Read "Nail It Then Scale It" and "The E-Myth Revisited". You'll save time and
money. You might also study business strategy (free courses on Coursera) so
you can evaluate your idea from business fundamentals first. The more you can
invalidate it (no market, massive incumbents, no demand, too costly, etc.),
the less time and money you'll waste building something nobody wants, and the
better placed you'll be to spot a truly great opportunity.

As a developer it's natural to focus on your strengths. You need to validate
ideas before doing that.

------
afshinmeh
I don't know what you do at work but if I were you, I wouldn't do that. Not
because of money, but because you need something that motivates you and gives
you the feeling of accomplishing things.

I'd like to quote this:

\- 80% of your time goes to low-risk/reasonable-reward work

\- 15% of your time goes to related high-risk/high-reward work

\- 5% of your time goes to satisfying your own curiosity

Read this twice: [https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/fresh-
work-80155/11...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/fresh-
work-80155/1186004658099063/)

------
cellis
Just got done doing this. Spent 30k in cash and maybe 60k ( like, 60k in cold,
hard, 2017 posttax dollars ) in opp cost. It was fun but I had the same "idea"
as you, which is to say _multiple_ ideas, which really is no idea. Still
haven't launched a product and racked up a decent amount of cc debt. If you
quit,don't use your runway like I did to design and build a product. Use it to
pitch, pitch, pitch and pitch some more. That's your new job; pitching and
raising ( or pre-selling if you can with e.g. Kickstarter ), NOT building!.

------
wslh
I will never quit my job without having better signals of profits from your
project. My second advice is methodologies (e.g. release on Tuesday?) don't
matter when you don't have a business.

------
mindcrime
Some thoughts:

Everything will take longer than you expect. Nobody will answer your emails or
return your phone calls. If somebody, by amazing chance, does reply, it will
be weeks later than you expected.

The code you thought you could finish in a month? It'll take 4 months. And you
still won't be satisfied with it then. And you should be so lucky as to have
written something anybody will actually pay money for.

As Grant Cardone says, companies die from lack of attention. Nobody can buy
your product or service if they've never heard of it. You have to find (a)
way(s) to get people's attention. Jump and and down and scream and yell at the
top of your lungs. You have to figure out the marketing / promotion / sales
stuff to succeed. Don't believe "if you build it they will come." You have to
work far harder than you might expect, just to get on someone's radar so they
will even consider buying your thing.

OTOH, the good news is, you don't have to worry about competition from other
startups. Startups don't die from competition from other startups. They die
because they build something nobody wants, or they can't figure out how to get
attention in the market.

Read _The Four Steps To The Epiphany_ by Steve Blank. Read _The 10x Rule_ and
_Be Obsessed or Be Average_ by Grant Cardone. Read _The Discipline of Market
Leaders_.

------
jakozaur
You should have at least 18 months savings of your expenses + expected
business costs. That's least runaway you need to get ramen-profitable if you
do it alone and not planning on raising any money.

If not do, do some freelancing, part time job, whatever you need not to run
out of money.

------
mcjiggerlog
Unless you want to take time off regardless and have plenty of money to burn
through, I'd save leaving your job until you are already making money with one
of your projects. You can get pretty damn far just working on projects in your
spare time.

~~~
welpwelp
Thank you for your reply! I'll link you to mine since there has been similar
replies.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442866)

------
mead5432
So you don't have a product built already?

Your plan reads as if: quit job --> make product --> get rich

Why not build the product at night to get an MVP, maybe take some vacation
days if necessary to build and/or sell it to prospects, make some money and
then quit your job?

You only have a few thousand which seems like you are banking on your idea
taking off right away and I can tell you from experience it rarely does.

------
mhowland
Don't listen to the Don't(s). Only you know your circumstances, if you're in a
position to follow your inspiration (no kids, mortgage, etc), awesome do it.
These circumstances (typically) evaporate with age, take advantage of them.

Worst case, you learn a ton (probably more about yourself than anything else)
and you still have a trade (software dev) that will land you you in the top 1%
worldwide in terms of standard of living to fallback on. Best case you build a
rad business, plenty of room in between.

That said, become enamored with the problem not the tools (django/python, JS
etc). Try to get "ramen" profitable or feedback with the least possible
effort. The hard part of sideprojects is rarely the dev, it's most always the
marketing.

On the marketing side, read, read, read...then experiment, experiment,
experiment. Given the lack of capital you're gonna need to be creative, it can
be fun, it can be frustrating...this will be the hardest part of your journey.

Good luck, have fun, learn a ton.

~~~
welpwelp
Thank you for your comment!

I like your mindset and this is the one I try to have. The tools I mentioned
are the ones I use best. Like you said, the choice of tools does not concern
me as much as validating my idea and getting to revenue. I'll keep in mind
your advice about marketing.

I hope everything is well for you at Scalus!

------
tn_mobile
Go for it man!!!

What kind of JS Framework are you going to use? Also, what kind of DB will you
be using, how are you going to make it scale? How many years of Django xp do
you have, do you think it'll scale well?

~~~
tobltobs
Did you forget the sarcasm tag?

~~~
tn_mobile
of course not!!!!!#12

------
GoToRO
If you use your brain to work then playing games, watching documentaries,
reading books and articles does not qualify as relaxation. What qualifies are
the activities in which you don't use your brain as in: gym (mandatory, all
weekdays), walks, manual labor etc.

On weekdays, at 5 pm, you leave the house (mandatory) :)

~~~
welpwelp
I love it, thank you!

------
tobltobs
If I would have to choose between the stress of 1.) building a MVP in the
evenings or on weekends, while still having a day job or 2.) building a MVP
fulltime and realizing that my business idea wasn't brilliant and I don't have
enough resources left to pivot, then I would choose 1.) every time.

------
pornel
I'm doing this right now.

\- You need more savings. Everything takes longer, and building the tech is
only a small part of building a business. I thought I've had MVP 90% done when
I left my job, but I underestimated just how many mundane time-eating problems
there are (technical and non-technical).

\- If you're going to move to a cheaper place, move before you quit the job.
Negotiating is much harder when you're effectively unemployed.

\- Be very very careful not to overengineer the code before you've validated
the product. If you love the tech you could spend infinite amount of time
building nice abstraction layers and scalable databases, but the #1 priority
is ensuring the business won't die before you even need to scale.

------
pieterhg
_> Levels has been greatly inspiring to me_

Thank you! <3

 _> I've decided to quit my job to boostrap my projects à la IndieHackers_

To anyone else: DON'T DO THIS.

First get enough cashflow from your side project to sustain yourself (e.g.
$1k/m to $2k/m if you're single, without kids, in an average city). You will
burn yourself out if you don't have cashflow. Savings is nice but cashflow is
better, because if it runs, it probably keeps running. Savings, you run out.

It took me YEARS to get anything substantial off the ground on the internet.
You can't just quit your job and expect to get money within months. It's not
smart. Consider going back to your job or getting another job and keeping the
cashflow from that. Then work on side projects in your own time and quit when
it makes enough money.

Seeing all these product makers on Twitter etc. they make it seem easy but you
don't see the intense battle they had to go through for years to get where
they are now. It takes time and lots of it! I was making sites since I was 10
and my first site that made money was after 10 years! Not that money was my
goal when I was 10yo, but still. You don't realize people's histories.

I bankrolled Nomad List ([https://nomadlist.com](https://nomadlist.com)) in
2014 with my YouTube channel
([https://youtube.com/pandadnb](https://youtube.com/pandadnb)) that made
$2-8k/m from 2010-2014. When Nomad List started making $5k/m, I stopped
working on the YouTube. I bankrolled my YouTube channel in 2010 with a a
terrible blog about ASUS tablets
([http://asustablet.com](http://asustablet.com), see screenshot @
[http://dig.do/screenshot-hires/201310/asustablet.com-
transfo...](http://dig.do/screenshot-hires/201310/asustablet.com-transformer-
including.jpg)) that made $500/m. I bankrolled that tablet blog in 2009 with
being in university and getting $200/m college subsidy from the government
since 2007.

My point is, you can keep stepping up and bankrolling the next project with
cashflow from your previous project. That way I've never had to do ANY
freelance work or get a normal job EVER.

 _> My plan is to build everything myself, using a stack such as Python/Django
+ HTML/CSS/JavaScript + eventually iOS, and the initial goal after validating
my MVPs is to become "ramen profitable."_

Great choice! Avoid frameworks like Meteor, React etc. they're a rabbit hole
that will paralyze you from shipping and getting to revenue.

My simple stack is:

Client: HTML, CSS, JS with jQuery (JS talks to server API via basic AJAX
requests), CodeKit (to compile + minify my JS and CSS)

Server: API written in PHP that connects to SQLite and Postgres databases
(just a better version of MySQL)

The client stack (HTML, CSS, JS) is mostly same for everyone, the server stack
you can also do in JS, Python, Ruby or whatever server language you like best.

 _> \+ eventually iOS_

This stack has the benefit you can easily build an iOS app that just connects
to your server API. Now your iOS app is simply another client app.

I'd recommend AGAINST learning iOS in your first year, as your time is
limited. And even with Swift, it's a rabbit hole.

You want to get to cashflow as fast as possible to avoid burning out and
running out of cash, so focus on revenue. The web (vs. native) is I think
fastest way to quickly acquire money from customers.

For payments, use Stripe.

Good luck!

~~~
xenopticon
> _Avoid frameworks like Meteor, React etc. they 're a rabbit hole that will
> paralyze you from shipping and getting to revenue._

I agree with the part where you say to avoid tools that don't paralyze you
from shipping and getting revenue. On the other hand, I think that if someone
is fast and productive with React or Meteor, that is the tool he/she should be
using to build anything.

~~~
pieterhg
Yes, absolutely. Always use whatever is fastest for you.

~~~
antoniuschan99
I would also like to add that you should get to mvp as fast as possible so
that you can charge for whatever you've built.

I think a lot of devs focus too much on coding and not enough on revenue. Make
sure the feature you're adding has value, or else you're just wasting your
time.

I also made the mistake of using the project as an opportunity to learn new
technologies which is dangerous because it can eat into the time it takes to
ship.

~~~
welpwelp
Agreed, I've done that too before : )

------
jorgemf
Red flags:

\- I only have a few $k (even with a product-market fit since day 1, it is
going to take you time to generate enough revenue)

\- My plan is to build everything myself (do everything alone is not a good
idea, you need at least external support for the bad days)

\- Levels has been greatly inspiring (it should be your project/product what
inspires you, not others project)

\- my question is whether there are any advice you can think of (definetly you
need a plan before quitting your job)

My advice:

\- don't quit your job, you don't need it to launch an MVP and get your first
customer. Actually don't even thing about forget your only income until you
have some customers in your MVP.

\- try to make your first sell even before finishing the MVP (there is no
better validation than this one)

\- pick a stack you already know very well

\- focus on the minimum features that will make your customers pay

\- don't read about other projects, yours is different with it nuances and you
lose your focus when reading about others

\- talk with your customers since yesterday

\- do go to meet ups, unless you are planning to get some customers there

\- spend at least the same time doing marketing (user research, promoting,
measuring kpis, ect) as you spend developing the product

\- don't quit your job

\- release your MVP yesterday

\- do small and fast releases, big releases are a pain to test, small releases
mean less bugs in every release and you get early feedback

\- focus, focus, focus. Simple services is not a product or project, pick one,
sell it, launch the MPV, and if it doesn't work move to the next one.

\- sell your product before even having an MPV or write a line of code

\- be ready to fail, most projects fail. Set a metric before start the project
to decided whether you are failing or not in advance and move on with other
stuff as soon as you detect you are failing

~~~
6DM
Just curious, how do you sell a product before exists? Do you literally sell
it, or do you pitch it and then when they're sold on the idea you tell them it
doesn't exist.

~~~
wayn3
the usual approach is a google form, stating what you are going to make.

then you presell it. meaning you sell something that does not yet exist. if X
number of people buy, you build it. if too little people want it, you return
their money and say sorry.

then you deliver the product in as little code as possible. if its just
information, write an email instead of building a fully responsive javascript
react native reflux multi tenant fully distributed app.

yes, its not called reflux. but thats what it induces in the developer.

edit: thats how you presell products that are sufficiently easy to make. if
you are looking at bigger projects like, say, a fusion reactor - you dont
presell your customers. you presell investors. you do that by saying "heres
the paper weve written as postdocs in university, we think we have a decent
shot at making this happen". then you take the money and build the first step
of your roadmap. then you go back to raising and presell "see? weve built
feature X successfully. now we need more money to build the next thing". and
so on, until you have a product.

the process doesnt really change, just who you presell.

~~~
6DM
Presell go fund me style (not using the site, just a money first example), or
presell as in you email a group to take a survey?

~~~
wayn3
"hey i have 5 ultimate frisbee frisbees with super mario bros. art on it. want
one? $25 bucks to my paypal"

example taken from noah kagan explaining the process. if you manage to collect
the cash, you order the frisbees from the vendor you found. if you dont sell
5, just ship the money back. the example is deliberately simple but you can
apply that to anythign. you have a business idea, sell the result of the
business. if nobody wants it, dont build it.

i dont know go fund me, but if you run a kickstarter, its basically the same
thing. you say you need an amount of X dollars to be able to deliver. if its
not met, just return the money. the fact that people on kickstarter are idiots
and dont deliver after collecting money is another story.

------
_rknLA
Having done this (/ currently doing it), I would say: follow your heart.

Taking time off to nurture your own projects is a fine and reasonable personal
endeavor, but not necessarily an optimal business or financial one.

In many ways, the time and space can help you explore and expand your ideas
into something in the middle of the venn circles between "your happy with it"
and "the market is happy with it".

But, don't expect to be done with day jobs after burning through "a few $k".

Depending on where you live, and who's in your network, you may be able to
move to part time, agency, or freelance work after burning through your runway
in order to keep enough time to work on your thing.

My operating assumption with all of this is, your current day job is
preventing you (in one way or another) from focusing on your own projects.
This is ok. Not everyone can handle burning the candle at both ends with the
day job and night-work. Figure out a way to make space for both until the
personal project becomes sustainable.

Beyond this, the other advice about 10-15% tech and validating your idea
before hitting the code is solid.

I have a single-time-purchase iOS app in the App Store, and a month or two
after releasing the app, spending one day investigating blogs and websites,
and one day sending tuned press release letters to them did more for my sales
than any new feature I could have designed or coded in that amount of time.

------
snarf21
The three most important things (imho) are this:

1) Most of your assumptions are wrong. Tell/ask everyone you can about your
idea and evaluate all feedback.

2) Figure out how you are going to get customers and get them to pay. If you
don't know this first, you'll never get anywhere.

3) Find someone to work with. This is a very hard thing and you are going to
get discouraged constantly. You'll need external motivation or you'll give up.

Everything else can be overcome with hard work.

------
goblin89
I have quit my long-term position (remote contract) with less than $2.5k in
the bank about a month ago.

It wasn’t much of an impulse move. Thought of it as a last-resort measure to
motivate me into building projects of my own, with subsequent evolution into
adequately priced freelance consulting and bootstrapping own businesses. The
alternative would have been remaining at that position with bare minimum pay,
no portfolio gain (strictly internal company projects), no growth or career
advancement potential, no security or insurance.

Bad:

– Quitting itself was poorly planned and resulted in ruined connections with
ex-colleagues at the company and unnecessary stress.

– Initially experienced fierce drive and got a lot done in a few days, but now
the focused vision is gone. I regret not having changed something in my life
to make motivation a non-issue prior to quitting.

– Returning to my pretty much third-world country after nomadic lifestyle is
depressing, and so is the likely necessity of living with parents. Nonexistent
real-life opportunities and networking potential, even if somewhat cheaper
food.

– Doesn’t help that people close to me in life think I got fired and didn’t
make the tough call myself.

Good:

– I remain convinced I’m better off, all opposing opinions be damned.

All the luck to you!

------
Kunix
Good software rarely makes money by itself - you'll need to have a focus on
validating your market, acquiring new users and finding features people would
be willing to pay for.

levelsio is a great example of this. The guy is actually graduated with a
Master degree in "Business Administration, Entrepreneurship & New Business
Venturing" [1]. His main focus is on business development [2][3][4]. Software
development is just something he needs to do in order to grow his business
ideas.

Nomad List is great not only because levelsio created a nice product, but also
because he successfully built a community and did great marketing to promote
the "digital nomad" way of life.

So question to yourself: Why do you want to do this for? Creating a business
or creating a software?

If your main motivation is to create a business, then design your software
development cycle to spend plenty of time focusing on the business needs.

[1]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/levelsio](https://www.linkedin.com/in/levelsio)

[2] Greatly handles communication -
[https://twitter.com/levelsio](https://twitter.com/levelsio)

[3] His blog posts are designed around visibility, product placement and
referral links - [https://levels.io/how-i-build-my-minimum-viable-
products/](https://levels.io/how-i-build-my-minimum-viable-products/)

[4] He uses whatever technology is the quickest / most convenient for his
business ideas (nomadlist started as a Google spreadsheet, then as a PHP
website).

------
santa_boy
I feel the general advice is don't do it and with good reason!

However, I feel that if you have good skills this should be the way to go.
Hustle and get profitable. It is not that difficult using services.

The moonlighting alternative sounds appealing but I find the progress to be
extremely slow and there are just too many distractions to really make it
useful.

I know there are people who do it successfully, but I feel they are supermen
and a notch above most.

Just my 2 cents.

~~~
welpwelp
Thank you! It seems from all the feedback that I'm significantly against the
odds, but I really want to give it a shot.

------
macca321
I tried this (and it didn't work out), so here's my advice:

Keep your job, allocate a fixed amount of money each month to the business,
and spend it all on advertising, copy writers and development.

You already know how to program, so you can be an effective PO for a remote
team, you (probably) don't know how to delegate work or market stuff. Also,
having to pay for the development will encourage you to create a real minimum
VP.

------
ansek
1) Try to sell before you write the code like a company called Buffer did. All
you need is just a landing page and not MVP.

2) Levels, as I know, had a YouTube channel with $1500-3000 of mostly passive
income and already had followers before he created NomadList.

3) IndieHackers earns $1500-2500 after 5 months of work - the question here is
can you properly live with a few $k so much time?

------
muramira
My two cents is 1.Keep your job and hack on your projects at night/weekends.
2. You'll make better decisions for your projects/businesses when you are not
worried about how to pay rent. 3.Use Steve Blank's startup manual to validate
your idea before you even write one line of code. Good luck

------
_Understated_
Don't quit your day job, not yet anyway.

You need to tear apart your idea and find flaws, rework assumptions and so on
before you write a single line of code. The way you do that is by asking your
potential customers and if you are struggling to find them now, when you have
an income, then it will be even harder later on when you have no money and
start getting desperate.

Learn to describe your product in two sentences. Not the features but "this
product will fix problem X" in two sentences.

Also, your MVP should be some renders done in mspaint or something free/cheap
- explaining the tool and then showing someone an A3 print out of it will
either work or it won't... In my case it worked spectacularly and everyone got
it. If it doesn't then back to the drawing board with a better picture or a
better explanation.

Basically, validate, validate, validate.

------
stockkid
> I've decided to quit my job to bootstrap my projects

I did something similar last year to unsuccessfully bootstrap a SaaS product.
I wrote about what I learned here: [https://sungwoncho.io/lessons-from-
building-vym/](https://sungwoncho.io/lessons-from-building-vym/)

Afterwards I launched another product called RemoteBase but it's not doing
that well. What I learned: [https://sungwoncho.io/lessons-from-successfully-
launching-re...](https://sungwoncho.io/lessons-from-successfully-launching-
remotebase/)

As others said, I would advice you to build cashflow from your side projects
while at your job. Happy to share more. Good luck.

------
jonathanbull
Firstly, congrats on deciding to take the plunge. I took a similar move a year
ago and left full time employment to bootstrap my side project, EmailOctopus
([https://emailoctopus.com](https://emailoctopus.com)). I haven't looked back
since.

If you can, stay in employment a while longer and validate your MVP in your
spare time. I had a few ideas which missed the mark and it took me almost a
year to find a project that showed the growth I was looking for. If I hadn't
had the luxury of a monthly pay packet, I would have ran out of money before I
had the chance to properly pursue the goal.

Wishing you the best of luck!

------
keviv
I left my job to work on my own idea. I just had enough to survive for 3-4
months. I started working as a freelance consultant for a US company which
allows me to keep paying my bills. Though the problem is, the company I
freelance for is my only source of income and the contract is about to get
over. I am looking for another contract position to keep paying my bills. If I
get one, I'd be able to keep working on my project else I'd finally go back to
a full-time job.

So, think before you decide. If you decide to leave, take up a contract job if
possible. That'd keep you going without fear of running out of money.

------
LifeQuestioner
If you're following someone elses method of doing something, you're not
following you.

Bare in mind Levels was exactly in the problem space he was solving with
nomadslist. He lived and breathed it, he could solve his customer's problems,
because he was solving his own problems.

He had thousands of twitter followers before he started. It looks like quick
success - but he's worked really fucking hard, for a long time before. He
spent a year on one project before starting the 12 startsups/projects in 12
months.

Are you following yourself, or just another method someone stumbled upon? :)

Doesn't mean you can't do it, FUCKING GO FOR IT!

------
skizm
I always wondered what it is like getting back into a day job after taking an
extended leave from the working world (6-12 mo). I was considering this, but
ultimately I just wanted to program my own stuff, not start a company or even
make any money. I fully intended to get a day job again in a year or so, I was
just wondering how frowned upon it was to take a year off.

Anyone have any experience with that?

~~~
sahrizv
Personal Anecdote: I've been on a planned break since June '16 to build stuff,
among other things. I get approached by top Indian startups once a week on
average and nobody seems to lose interest when I tell them I'm on a break.

I have come to love a language called Elixir while working with it during the
break and potential employers take it as a positive when I mention this fact.

Before I quit, I was a Tech Lead at an early stage startup(now Series B
funded) for 6 months and I'll be looking for employment soon. I do not see
this being a problem in my case.

~~~
skizm
Neat, that was basically what I was hoping to hear. I'll probably build a bit
more savings so I can feel secure running on my own gas for a year, but I'm
definitely planning it in the near future.

~~~
sahrizv
Yes, definitely build up a good runway or you'll find yourself negotiating
from a position of weakness when you look for a job with urgency.

Another thing would be that employer preferences differ with regional factors,
so get opinions from some local friends who have done this.

Finally, as you might already know, you must realize that this is a gamble.
I'd play in a way that I have some guaranteed upsides(learning, fun,
experience, autonomy), bounded downsides(loss of income, loss of seniority,
stress) and unguaranteed, unbounded upsides($$$..$$$).

------
huhtenberg
> _Save me mistakes_

Quitting a job before having an MVP and a rudimentary validation of your idea
is a very bad idea. Sit on your paycheck until your project takes off.

That's unless you are quitting for different reasons, e.g. to take a break,
traveling and, perhaps, possibly, try and see if you can also work on a side
project at the same time. But the likelihood of this working well is near
zero.

------
nicholas73
If you quit without adequate cash, you will spend most of your time worrying
about money rather than building your project. If you have your parents'
support, then you spend time worrying about their level of support.

I would not take this level of risk unless you have already validated your
idea through a customer sale, and it's just a matter of finishing the project
to deliver.

------
keeptrying
Figure out how you can make a steady stream of money from what you love to do.
After that you can quit.

Without that momentum into jumping into working in your own, it becomes really
hard.

Right now that taste and understanding of creating money is Something that
your employer knows and that you don't and that you are terribly under
Estimating.

------
marcusgarvey
If you already have some target markets in mind, get to know as much as you
can about things like their buying habits; their influencers; where they hang
out online; conferences they might go to; what content topics matter to them,
etc.

------
hv23
Validate first, build later.

------
yalogin
Why did you decide to quit your job? Could you not work on your projects on
the side of while working?

Also if you don't mind me asking, what is your personal life like? Are you
single or need to support a family?

------
mrgreenfur
I suggest you have a pool of customers ready to give you money ASAP. The
engineering will take longer than you think and then the
sales/marketing/customer development will also take longer.

------
theparanoid
Creating something other people will pay money for is very very hard. 90+% of
projects are ignored and forgotten.

I've had two successful projects over 10yrs which is about average.

------
Taylor_OD
If you need this to make money for you to live then work on it until it starts
making money. You don't know if it ever will right now.

------
marknutter
I recently quit my job to start a startup, but this isn't my first go 'round.
The first 8 years of my software development career I freelanced while I
"bootstrapped my projects". I'll give you one guess as to how much money I
made on my projects vs how much money I made contracting.

I took full-time work after it became clear my startup ambitions weren't
panning out and suffered through that for 3 years. That was, however, enough
time for a lot of very important lessons to solidify in my head. This time,
I'm taking a far different approach, which is as follows

\- put off coding for as long as possible. Every line of code you write before
you validated that someone actually wants to use what you're writing is time
(read: money) that you've thrown down the tube

\- your big idea sucks by default, so don't come up with a big idea. Get as
many meetings with as many people as you can (preferably decision makers) and
ask them about the sources of pain within their organization. It won't take
long to find a real opportunity.

\- speaking of opportunities, be wary of anything that you're initially
excited about solving. If you're excited about it, that means it's fun, and if
it's a fun problem to solve, that means there are more people who are willing
to solve it, which means it's less valuable to solve. Find problems that are
painful and tedious to solve to guarantee your competition is minimal. After
all, that's what people really pay other people money for - to avoid pain

\- do the hard things first, which for engineers, is _talking to people_. The
majority of your time should be spent learning about your potential customer.
By the time you actually write a single line of code it should be painfully
obvious exactly what needs to be built.

\- Use old, proven tech. The biggest enemy you will contend with is your own
desire to use shiny, cutting edge technologies. You want to use tools,
languages, and techniques that have no "unknown unknowns". Use proven tech,
but more importantly, use tech you're already comfortable with. You don't want
to be finding and fixing bugs for other people's software on top of writing
your own.

\- If you don't trust yourself not to over-design, over-engineer, or in
general turn your minimum viable product into a maximum viable product, pay
someone else to write your code. Because you're not paying yourself when you
write your own code, the tendency is to devalue the work, which leads to a
higher likelihood that you will work on the fun but less important parts of
the project first. If you're paying someone else real money to do it, you will
make damn sure they only build an _actually_ minimum viable solution to the
problem you identified.

\- Design comes last. There's such hyper emphasis on UX and design these days
that it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it's the most important
part of solving someone's problem. If craigslist survived for as long as it
has by using the native web ui toolkit, your product likely can too. "Does it
solve the problem" comes way before "does it look good doing it". The only
exception is if you're making a carbon clone of a software solution that has a
proven market but severe problems with design and usability (e.g. IRC being
cloned by the more usable and pretty Slack).

\- B2B, not B2C (but it sounds like you already know this)

\- Avoid empty room problems. If your solution's effectiveness relies on a
critical mass of users you will likely run out of money and patience before
you get there. Only try solving these types of problems if you're willing to
stick with the community building aspect for a sufficiently long period of
time or are independently wealthy to begin with.

\- You can freelance to pay your bills, but avoid relying on it too much.
There's no greater motivating factor for creating a product that people
actually want to pay for than _actually needing them to pay for it in order
for you to survive_. Deciding which modern framework to use, how you're going
to scale to a billion users, or tweaking your designs to pixel perfection will
suddenly seem a lot less important when your rent is coming due.

\- Find a co-founder. I know you think you'll be fine going about this on your
own, but Paul Graham is right; there's almost no better measure for success in
a startup than the presence of a co-founder. Running a startup can be likened
to willingly accepting a bout of temporary insanity because it requires you to
believe in a reality that doesn't exist... yet. It's easier to prop up that
reality when you have someone with you to reinforce it. The goal is to turn
that insanity into sanity by making that fantasy into a reality. Momentum,
morale, and faith in the unproven are the most important and hardest aspects
of a startup to maintain (again, not the code). You're building a cult, so
find your first adherent.

Good luck!

------
DrNuke
Odds say it will be a bad business decision (how bad? ymmv) but life is short
so good luck and enjoy the ride.

------
siphr
Dont! Never ever do that. If you want to bootstrap do it on the side. Only
quit your job if the project matures. Not only that, but a solid benefit is
that the skills/ideas you might learn from your project will cross pollinate
into your work, therefore making you a better employee hence more valuable.

------
dmragone
Stop reading these comments and get to work. You don't have time for both.

------
friendly_chap
Don't.

------
sova
Okay here is what you really must do if you are ambitious about building
everything yourself.

Break your application down into smaller applications that exploit a
particular feature. For example, if you are making a chat application, first
make a simple Node.js site that can post to a Database and Read from the
database and render a post in html.

Maybe add some extra functionality.

Then go on and make a really simple site that uses sockets to make a simple
group chat box or something simple like a haiku sharing site (to tell you what
I made).

Moving on, you can finally synthesize these two approaches and make your
ambitious app. You already know how each component-that-is-kinda-tricky works
so you can go into your huge awesome superapp with confidence that you'll get
the layering right and not forget anything.

So that's about it, go in chunks.

I am a designer and if you are building everything from scratch I highly
recommend you do two things:

1) read the book "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud. He talks about the
"Infinite Canvas" which is a great metaphor for what a screen is capable of.

2) get plain paper, pencils, scissors, tape, and coloring equipment and make
cut-outs of every screen. You can even make buttons, slide cut-out divs across
the screen, simulate behavior in a tangible and visible way. It is by far the
best way to prototype a web-app.

3) Focus on making something people love. Yeah yeah you keep your job or not,
makes no difference to me. You'll have something. File at the local temp
agency for a coding gig PT in the meantime and work 3 days and spend 4 on your
projects.

If you are confident in your products and their appeal, have some
corroboration from would-be users, go for it.

Money? I don't know, my idea is that you make something awesomely useful and
people will use it, and from there you can bank on the traffic in some way.
Maybe you run your own "hey here are some ads" service or just rely on "one-
dem-giants" and let funds slowly trickle in. Monetization is sadly important,
but if you are making something people will use then I don't think you need to
consider it as much. Of course, I'm not rich, and that may be the reason why,
so take this here chunk with a couple grains of pepper perhaps.

If you want environment+coding recommendations I say:

Node.js + MongoDB (or Redis?)

Use WebSockets (if you must use socket.io for the syntax be sure to upgrade it
by adding a line to use micro web sockets (uws)... findable on your local
githubs)

Or Ajax^

If you have more time and more float, I would say take the time to read
BraveClojure. Most simple web apps would become:

Compojure for routing, Enlive or Hiccup for templating, and some Database.

Once you want to do more javascripty/real-time interactions, I say stick with
Node.js and Sockets ... but if you are looking for long-term expansion of an
app (that has research-potential in the future) you gotta build it from the
ground up with the best possible tools of your time.

So yeah, just some thoughts. Be creative and make something beautiful, friend.
Societal Value > Profit.

That said, hope you make a bunch doing it.

------
globuous
After grad school, I've spent a year making a music web app with 3 friends (I
was fortunate to have family was funding me). I'm now doing the opposite of
you as I've just signed my first job post graduation. But Here's my 2 cent
anyway:

I'm just a young graduate, but so far what I consider the 2 most important
things in starting a business are to surround yourself with the right people,
and be able to manage them.

About your project, you can do a market study to buy time. If it's a service,
then maybe you don't need much more than a landing page for now. Maybe you can
fake the product you're selling if it's a desktop app, and only show videos on
your landing page (I think that's what dropbox initially did). this allows you
to study the market before/during coding and/or keep your job at the same
time.

As a coder, the most useful thing I've had in this team is a UI/UX designer.
Because without him, I'd lose hours trying to find the right
spacing/sizing/centring for all my divs. More over, always make sure that you
understand a wireframe before coding. And most importantly, make sure you have
a wireframe before coding. Because maintaining your html/react/sass will
quickly be time consuming if you change your UI often. Especially if the app's
responsive.

Don't worry about the stack, use what you know. It looks like you're in a rush
to make money since you're quitting your job. Don't learn the latest JS/Python
Foo if you're already efficient in Bar. If you already know react and redux,
structure your code such that you can reuse as much code as possible when
porting to ios/android using react native.

Funny anecdote of how we lost many days trying to figure out why our bounce
rate was so huge. We realised that users thought that our buttons were
textboxes and wouldn't click on them. Once we realised that, we simplified the
landing page so a user HAD to know that these textbox looking objects were
buttons because the only thing to do on the page was click on them.
Subconsciously, the users now knew what a button looked like on the app. So
yes, sometimes you will waste days on things because you're not looking at the
right place (in our case we imaged all source of problems possible, but not
that users didn't know what a button on our website looked like). Try as much
as possible to stay open minded, because things will be obvious to you but not
your users. Working on projects alone can make this hard to remember.

I guess what i'm trying to communicate is the obvious: don't lose any time
unnecessary time. Always plan ahead. Don't under estimate the amount of work
there is to do. Be able to delegate the right task to the right people at the
right time while supervising that everything goes on smoothly. Remember the
product is designed for users that have never used it.

------
throwawasiudy
> I don't want to raise money and I only have a few $k

BE VERY AFRAID. I did this thinking I could get something off the ground fast
enough to generate minimum income to live. It's possible ONLY if your level of
support is "I live at mom & dads house".

I had enough social support to undo my mistake but it took close to 4 months
to find another comparable job. It took another 2 months to pay back my
friends for their generosity. 6 mos down the drain living on shitty couches
and damaging friendships when I could have been saving money to make a less
halfhearted attempt.

I will do it again, but a more realistic amount of money to start a business
is 20-30k if you're on your own. This initial cash is your runway of sorts. If
you have a few co-founders you could probably swing 40k all together. And 30k
is enough of your own skin in the game to get an investor to double or triple
that. 50-100k is enough to start a real bootstrapped business.

Also be wary of working on your new project while working for your current
employer. Most have non-compete and ip-assignment clauses in the contract. If
you're running a dog walking business it isn't worth their time, but if you
ever build a business to the multi-million level they will swoop in and take
everything you have.

------
Cozumel
> I've decided to quit my job

Don't.

