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Ask HN: Is it realistic to launch a product if you have young kids?
13 points by mijustin on Jan 2, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments
Many product people are able to launch products because they don't yet have kids. Simply put: they have a lot more disposable time with which to launch a product.

For those of you with kids: is it realistic to launch a product if you have young children?

I imagine that certain types of products (like e-books) are more realistic than a full-blown SaaS app.

I'd love to hear from those of you that have successfully launched paid products while you've had young kids. What worked? What didn't?




It depends on what you mean by "launch." I started a web-based personal finance app (PearBudget) and launched it five years ago (2008/01/02). I had a three-year-old and six-month-old twins at the time.

It's gone relatively well, and has essentially been my sole income since then. BUT. I already had a small audience on it (we'd had 100,000 downloads of a free spreadsheet version of the tool; what would now be considered an MVP), so I wasn't trying to forge a new market for it.

It was a pretty brutal time, but I made it through. (It followed a year where I acted as the general contractor for the house we built, which was horrific, so I was kind of in a world-of-hurt groove at the time.)

Honestly, the flexibility it gave me to be home with my family — especially when they were so young — was an amazing gift.

What worked? Getting up very early. Having an understanding and supportive wife. Having parents who were willing to support us with money to live on while the subscriptions built up. (As I mentioned,) having a product that I knew had some traction already.

I'd be happy to talk more. E-mail is charlie@pearbudget.com.

Also, listen to Dan Benjamin's new podcast, Quit, especially the most recent episode: http://5by5.tv/quit/5. It's great.


Thanks so much for sharing your experience. 3 kids (including twins!) wow.

I especially appreciate your comments on "what worked".

I've been listening to Quit since episode #1; loving it.


By e-mail, I was asked a few questions, so I thought I'd share the answers here for everyone's benefit.

Q1: Did people downloading the initial spreadsheet (the one that got 100,000 downloads) need to enter their e-mail information in order to download it?

No, they didn't. I know modern defaults would have you grow an e-mail list, and would say that an e-mail address is a small price to pay for something of value. And they're probably right. But for a long time, I wasn't thinking there'd be more than the spreadsheet. I just made the spreadsheet to scratch an itch, and didn't see it as valuable enough to turn into a business. Eventually, I got frustrated with the spreadsheet for not being flexible enough, and knew that if I wanted it to live up to its potential, I'd need to turn it into a web app. Even then, for better or worse, I was thinking more about the product than "the business." I added an e-mail signup, but that was totally opt-in. At the time (2005, 2006), an e-mail address wasn't shared lightly (really; openly sharing e-mail was an invitation for spam; Gmail and its spam filters were neither as popular or effective as they are now).

A note about the e-mail list. When we launched the web app, I had high hopes that a significant number of the e-mail list would sign up (and pay). After all, these were interested people, right? They'd given me their e-mail address! I think we had 4,000 – 6,000 people on our list. So, of course, we'd end up with, like, 400 subscribers off of that, right? NOPE. In the end, I think it was .5% (so 5 out of every 1,000) that ended up subscribing. So, instead of 400 paying users, we had 20. It was a slow climb.

You can still download the spreadsheet if you like, at https://pearbudget.com/spreadsheet. It's free. And still has no e-mail gateway. I should probably change that at this point.

Q2: The spreadsheet: Did you release it on HN? Or were there other marketing channels?

No, didn't release it on HN. I think HN wasn't a gleam in Paul's eye at that point. Also, personal finance isn't something HN readers are as concerned about as they probably should be. So HN wouldn't have been the right vector, even if it had been around.

It was completely word-of-mouth. The one place that I can remember mentioning it was on MetaFilter's "Projects" page (in November of 2005), where the entirety of my post was: "PearBudget: Easy budgeting and finance-tracking for you GTD-types. Your money disappears. With a pocket full of receipts, 20 minutes a month, and this straightforward Excel spreadsheet, you can figure out where your money's going. It's free, so chalk that up as one place your money's not going."

At the time, the spreadsheet was far better than anything on the market, especially at the price point of $0. So I think people talked about it a fair amount. It eventually made it into Popular Science and a few other places. (The web app also got mentioned in several places, but I lose track of who talked about the spreadsheet and who talked about the web app.)

I think the leitmotif in all of this is that I wasn't trying to start a business. That just kind of happened. I've since tried to start another business, and that one didn't make it. I think the key thing was that I was passionate about this product, and kept wanting to make it better, and I wanted it to help other people, even (or especially) if they couldn't afford to pay for it. That is, my focus was on making the product and the world better, not on building a business. With the business that died, one of the main things that got in its way was my desire for it to be a business from the get-go. Maybe it would have died anyway. Hard to say. But I was concerned about things in Monotask like analytics and conversion rates and churn and marketing in ways that I wasn't concerned about for PearBudget, and those definitely distracted me from improving the product.

As to the original question, about marketing channels. I know the current / Lean Startup approach is to "charge from Day 1." I would encourage you to build something simple, cool, and useful, get it out there quickly, and see if people respond to it, before you worry about making it a business. If you're thinking of an e-book, get a sample chapter out there as a blog post, and see what kinds of attention it gets. If a web app, think about: what's the simplest way to do this? Hold lightly to it, but put heart into it. If it gets some traction, build on that. If not, think about why, and see if you need to take a different take on it.

One more thing, and I should have mentioned this in my earlier post. I started a podcast for webnerd/startup parents. http://donttouchthescreen.com. I only got two episodes in before putting it on hiatus, but I'm thinking about starting it up again. If folks here would be interested in that, let me know by Twitter (@charliepark). Thanks.


I would also say it depends in part on the particulars of your personal situation. For example, a kid who sleeps through the night and is generally healthy is going to be more launch-friendly than an insomniac child with health issues and other special needs. And a two parent home where your spouse is the one primarily doing the child-rearing will also be much more launch-friendly than a single parent home or two career couple.


I launched two ebooks with a 1 year old son. You just need to set aside a bit of time to work on it every day. Now working on a SaaS app. We'll see how it goes!


Nathan: I'm eager to hear what you learn!


It's very realistic. You may have to be realistic about what you launch and ensuring maybe that you have a business model in hand on the first one.

Chances you are a little old fashioned and like businesses, that actually, like, make money.

If so, there's lots of communities geared for you already. Micropreneur.com, and 30x500 are two that come to mind.

Ideally, work on finding and building an idea that there is already measurable demand for (but little or no competition).

This way -- the idea may not be sexy, but the business model is very sexy. Use the first product to "get off the grid" of working to chase things with longer runway if you like -- or not.

At risk of offending some (none intended), you should maybe spec out the HN demographic to realize many of us are unmarried, others are likely in their 20's without many responsibilities or interests beyond spending their time how they like.


Are you saying I should "spec out the HN demographic" in terms of the questions I ask? (as in this one) ;)


Definitely . . .

I think most people in this economy have a lot of irons in the fire . . . with good reason . . .

Over the past 4 years I've been working full time, free lancing full time, transitioned to working part time, consulting part time, then consulting fulltime and working on a SaaS product. All with a young family.

It will take some planning and hard work on your part.

Make sure you have blocks of family time and product work time setup and agreed on by everyone.

Balsamiq's founder had some good info on this in his mixergy interview. I think he had a set amount of time blocked out for his app that his wife agreed too . . .

http://mixergy.com/balsamiq-peldi-guilizzoni-interview/ you can track it down on iTunes.

Listen to StartUpsForTheRestOfUs.com . . . good information and you can email them questions as well.

Good luck in 2013.


Thanks.

I agree: it seems like blocking out a specific amount of time, and focusing during that time, is key.

I'm a big fan of Startups for the Rest of Us. They answered one of my questions on episode 111.


I left a full time (somewhat secure job) to go full time with my startup when I had an 8 month old at home and plans for a second child, which happened about 6 months later.

Yes, it was a little scary but I had the full support of my wife. And I knew if it all failed, it would be relatively easy to get a job again, probably the same job I left.

A couple of items that made it easier to do.. Living in Canada. I didn't have to worry about health care. Also, I knew my parents would help provide should things really go bad.

So I think you have to weight the reward you will get from the risk, plus what you have to fallback on.


It's definitely doable, although ultimately there are only so many hours in a day. You have to choose how and when to spend them carefully, with the support of your partner, as it can place additional load on them. Also, writing code on 4 hrs sleep after night feeds is no fun!

Young kids tend to sleep quite a lot relatively (if you're lucky) - so when they sleep, daddy works. It might mean shifting to 2-4 working session per day, somewhere quiet, instead of the more traditional 1 working session per day approach.

From my experience defining boundaries/rules that allow for constant, incremental progress on the product while keeping partner, kids and yourself happy is the key. It's very easy to just work all the time and burn yourself out.


Not only is it realistic, but sometimes necessary. I have a 3yo and have been managing my own product since before he was born. I wouldn't be able to support him if not for it. So to answer your question, yes.


That's great! Does your product provide full-time or part-time income? How many hours a week do you dedicate to it?


It's provided full time income for the past several years and I work anywhere from 10-40 hours/week on it.


Is this your only product? Or do you have multiple streams of revenue? (BTW: is your site ad supported, or membership supported?)




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