I have a confession. I still have not left my day job.
Go ahead. Judge me.
Actually wait! On second thought, before you do, hear me out.
First off, I believe in these 8 sentences “Don’t quit your job until you have to!”. You see, a business is a living organism. To survive, it needs to feed and it needs to react in a state that it is designed to. You feed a business resources so that it can react. These resources includes among other things, your time, commitment and more importantly, MONEY. If you feed it well, hopefully, it reacts by generating more money (revenue) than it consumes (cost). But the thing is, businesses do not react in Real-Time. It takes a lot of investments (time, energy and money) before you can start seeing some reaction. But before this time you cannot stop on feeding it.
As a founder, you have to constantly feed your start-up the resources that it deserves. Ideal case would be that you have plenty of cash to feed the business as well as enough to also feed you and your family. That would be ideal. However, not many founders find themselves in this situation. Some (myself included) are faced with putting in their savings into the business and still having to feed the family including paying the mortgage, loans etc… So a founder needs to assess his/her situation and plan out the best course of action that he needs to take. Which brings me back to my earlier statement. “Don’t quit your job until you have to!”
So when is the time to fully concentrate on the business and leave your cushy (or not so cushy as it is for me…) job? “As soon as possible!” someone might say. Perhaps… but to me, it depends… seriously… You need to evaluate the situation on a case-by-case basis. To me, i think when you have a beta version of your product and when you’ve peeled some of the major risk so that a VC would be willing to invest in your business (provided of course, you manage to ’sell’ and convince them the sustainability and attractiveness of your business plan and model…) that definitely is the time to concentrate fully on your startup. In fact, you should have already quit your job before you even get to this stage. This is because not many (or perhaps not even a single) VC’s out there would fund your business if you still have another job, so you need to decide on when to jump into the deep end carefully.
When is it NOT the time to quit? definitely when you don’t even have a proper business plan or when you don’t even have a prototype yet. Some of you might be lucky in getting Angel (pre-seed) investors to come in at the idea stage. If the funds are enough for you and your team to build your application at least up to the Alpha version. Excellent!! What are you waiting for? However, if you find yourself in a position where you still need some cash-flow for whatever reason and you don’t have enough funds to sustain it, then tread carefully.
I also hear a lot of people saying that you need to take risks! The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward, right? True… But to me, you need to take calculated risks… If you are the developer yourself and you can live with the Angel/pre-seed/your-own-savings fund that you have until you can come up with a beta version, you’re in a good position. If you are not a developer yourself, then what ever money that you get, you need to channel most (if not all) of it into developing your product. In the mean time, you have to make do with what ever you have and try to survive in any way… Unfortunately, I belong to the latter.
Of course there are certain conditions that you need to consider before taking this advice. There is the ethical aspect to the situation. That would be your judgment call. I guess the best case would be if your day job is totally unrelated to your start-up and you give 100% of your focus to your day job during working hours. You then only ‘work’ on your business after the working hours. But then, even if you manage to do this, there is still the argument that if you are a salaried worker, you are contracted to the company 24/7. Most employers even clearly state that you are not allowed to do this in the employment contract. As well, there is the argument that whatever that you create/develop while being employed is the property of your current employer. So, you need to use your own judgment on this. But again, tread very carefully.
The best way out of this situation and if you are still in the early development stage is to find another way to bring in the money so you can quit your day job. There are many other ways that you can do this. I am also looking into some of these alternative and will probably write about this at a later time. I seriously hope that I would get to that stage soon.
Frankly speaking, between you and me, I can’t wait to quit my job!
So there. I’ve said my peace… I’m not out here to please everyone. I’m just one of the guys who’s trying to make sense of it all…
Ok. Now go ahead.
Judge me.
.
*footnote* Although I have yet to quit my job. My other co-founder is working full-time on the start-up. It’ll be really difficult if none of the founders can focus 110% on the business. Hopefully, we are moving in the right direction…
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