I agree that is happening more often in the initial stages. And with a bit of experience/reputation you can command very favorable terms in the early stages of a start-up, at least in the present climate where seed type funding is relatively very easy to come by.
Or let's say you don't have much money and you want to avoid early VC due to loss of control and hefty dilution. In the US market, move to a college town (often quite safe), take a part-time $15 / hr retail job (CVS and Walgreens are both moving to that minimum in 2022; both are better than fast food and easier than Walmart type jobs), get a modest cost apartment ($650-$750), walk/bus/bike to work (no car expenses), keep your bills under $1k-$1.2k per month, build your start-up on Hetzner (new Virginia datacenter). Self-fund, build your thing, don't take early venture capital, maximize your leverage later on. Maybe occasionally do some side contracting work if necessary to fill up the personal treasury (10 hr per month or less).
The counter argument to that is primarily the speed angle, get bigger faster or get crushed by the VC funded crowd, and similar arguments. It likely varies by the case as to whether a given approach makes more sense or less (eg depending on what you're building, time to market may not be so much of the essence, or it may be critical).
Man, I hear a lot of horror stories about working at Walgreens and the like on Reddit, even among pharmacists
I guess that just going there part time as part of a bigger plan will be a lot lower-stress than trying to make a living off it, but that still sounds like a bad idea
You might be better off working as an engineer for a year and then saving 3-4 years' worth of minimum wage money instead
I had a friend who really regretted using his savings to try and bootstrap businesses though, since he was still working at Amazon in his 60s
If a person has enough experience at contracting to lean on that reliably, or enough skill to earn ~$80k-$100k per year (to build enough savings quickly for a good runway), then it's definitely not the ideal route to pull a part-time $15/hr type job (it'd be a waste of time).
And it only works well for younger people without a family, as it'll involve 70-80 hours of work per week (at least in the beginning).
It's a poor(er) person's scenario. It's what I might do if I were 19-21 years old again. Back then, circa 1999-2001, I did a lot of web development contracting to fund building things I wanted to build with the rest of my time. It was a quite unreliable path though, as some months were flush and others were bleak. Poor people in that scenario usually don't have degrees from nice universities, they often can't easily get good engineering jobs early on. And if they have an aversion to working for other people/companies, as I always have, then that complicates the context further (CVS & Co are mostly drone jobs; POS, scan bar codes, greet customers, bag items, stock shelves, repeat; and it might help reduce development burnout, as it gets you away from code and out of the house). If you're young'ish, poor'ish and without a ton of experience, it provides a highly workable avenue to go after building a thing you want to build, self-funded, while cutting out the need for early outside capital (the need to give up a piece of your soul to the sharks).
A lot of small business owners hand out paychecks on Friday Afternoon and then go to the all night gas station to earn the only paycheck they will get. Once the company is successful they can make earn a lot of money, but in the early years a company will often have more bills than income and the founder loses.
Note that all night is important in the above, not gas station. Anyplace that will let you work not normal business hours so you can work your business during business hours is what you need.
Or let's say you don't have much money and you want to avoid early VC due to loss of control and hefty dilution. In the US market, move to a college town (often quite safe), take a part-time $15 / hr retail job (CVS and Walgreens are both moving to that minimum in 2022; both are better than fast food and easier than Walmart type jobs), get a modest cost apartment ($650-$750), walk/bus/bike to work (no car expenses), keep your bills under $1k-$1.2k per month, build your start-up on Hetzner (new Virginia datacenter). Self-fund, build your thing, don't take early venture capital, maximize your leverage later on. Maybe occasionally do some side contracting work if necessary to fill up the personal treasury (10 hr per month or less).
The counter argument to that is primarily the speed angle, get bigger faster or get crushed by the VC funded crowd, and similar arguments. It likely varies by the case as to whether a given approach makes more sense or less (eg depending on what you're building, time to market may not be so much of the essence, or it may be critical).