Ask HN: Do you want to be employed only 3 days a week while starting a startup?

by gull on 10/9/2015, 2:47:34 AM with 5 comments
Hello HN. The fastest way to fund a startup may always be to fund it yourself. To be employed during the day, and work on the startup on nights and weekends.

One of the early bottlenecks with this is lack of time. You don't have as much time as you'd need to work on the startup. Which means if there was a way to quickly exchange money for time that would be something founders want.

Does anyone on HN want this?

Do you want to be employed only 3 days a week at a day job while starting your startup on the remaining 4 days?

Or are there enough signs that starting a startup takes over your life, and that the only conclusion from these signs is that you need to jump in fully every week, which means being employed only 3 days a week wouldn't be enough anyway?

If there is something here I'm missing I'd like to know it sooner than later. Thanks.

  • by andriesm on 10/19/2015, 11:25:50 AM

    My co-founder and I, have been spending 4/5 days a week on our startup, and 1(-2 days max) a week on paid-for programming work.

    It is really hard to find that sort of part-time paying work, especially on a long term retainer. (If anyone thinks it is easy to find such - please share!)

    We've done it this way, because this allows us to self-fund, and carry on much longer with our idea which we always new is one that would take a longer time than most other startups to gain a breakthrough.

    We are building stuff that would allow non-technical business users to draw their own systems into existance without programming.

    This is a hard problem, not something to attack with the typical MVP mindset, at least not at the outset.

    We also want the maximum time to pivot to different ways of marketing it, and applying it in different ways to try to get it to a solid financial outcome.

    Being pressured to make money of a startup can with some technologies, lead you to make short term smart decisions that are limiting you in the longer term.

    For those interested in what we are building:

    https://taskputty.com

    For now, we just have a CRM product, but you can alter any aspect of the system by changing process diagrams and using drag and drop editors.

  • by tixocloud on 10/9/2015, 3:48:52 PM

    I've been working full-time while pursuing passion projects in hopes of eventually starting a company. You've hit the right pain point with time being the challenge. I have frequently found myself wanting to dedicate more time to my company. However, with a family and other financial responsibilities, it's a challenge for sure. That said, I'm not prepared to give up on my dream no matter what the circumstance is. And in all honesty, working full-time does also help me to learn new things and develop skills that I need for my startup so there is a point to being employed first as opposed to just going all in.

  • by noomerikal on 10/9/2015, 3:11:23 AM

    I have been trying this out the past year. More like, get a contract gig for a 3-6 week period working on the startup stuff at night and then taking 4-8 weeks off to work on it full-time. It's a tough balancing act. I know personally for me the context switching with shorter time periods is difficult. There are so many times I want to complete a piece of functionality or fully fix a defect and not leave it in mid-stream to go work on something completely different.

  • by davelnewton on 10/9/2015, 3:00:40 AM

    I'd love to have a part-time full-time job so I had time to work on various passion projects.

  • by eschutte2 on 10/9/2015, 3:11:13 AM

    I've done this a lot, usually as a consultant. Works great. I haven't found that I wanted more time for the startups - in fact, the consulting work has been a good counter balance to the startup work.