Another way to approach this is to start a consulting business full-time, and use it as a springboard for whatever product idea strikes your fancy once you're established. As in, later; like, maybe a year later.
It's true that it's hard to balance consulting and product as a bootstrapping product startup. I used to get hung up on trying to explain how doable it is while acknowledging the pitfalls. Now I think, if you're not sure which way to go, put aside the product and just get a consulting practice up and running. Don't try to balance it. Don't worry about how you'll fit product into it.
I think you'll find that starting a product (or multiple products!) from a consulting practice is much, much easier than trying to do it by quitting a full-time W2 job. Meanwhile, probably about 40% of the work you do in your consulting practice is going to apply directly to your product company --- you'll learn to sell, to bill clients, to hire, to run payroll, and (most importantly) how to work with your team members.
Yes, totally agree with this. Consulting kinda softens the blow of your product taking time to gain traction. For startups, there is calendar time and labor time. Certain things, like SEO, marketing, email lists and credibility take time to build up, no matter how hard and fast you work.
Having a consulting business to take the edge off and still have income coming in really does help.
I have thought that this might be something effective but hadn't heard it articulated in this way before. It seems like a sensible way to bootstrap, and de-couples the process of launching a product and learning how to run a business.
Scott and I were able to pretty much jump from full time employee to the 1 week on -- 3 week off model. We did have one client in between that was just a 4 week job. The only reason we were doing consulting was to bankroll us while we worked on our product -- so we pretty much skipped the own clients and team/agency step.
I do think most people probably took the route you described though.
It'd be great if you could give some more details around finding and arranging work with this ideal client. It doesn't seem likely that this was your first interaction with the client. What was your relationship before you guys quit your job? How did you initially get in touch with them?
I like this concept but it is a client that can cater for this schedule.
I work three days a week as a consultant and the rest of the week I work on my product http://weekplan.net
Yes you have to context switch a bit, but you can deal with urgent stuff for both the client and your product on an ongoing basis.
It is easier to find a client that is ok for you to work only three days a week, and this is very important because it makes finding clients easier and therefore you re not distracted from your product.
Also because I can't work on my product for three days, it gives me some perspective on what I am doing and recharge the motivation battery constantly.
My team and I also tried this same approach for my mobile education startup - but differently.
The issue with working one week on, and three weeks off is that the client is willing to accommodate you flying off the radar for three weeks, and that makes it hard for them to plan their product according to your timing.
What we tried at App Ninja was to work a normal six day week, 12 hours a day. We would work on our product for the first 8 hours of the day, and the remaining 4 hours, we will work on our client projects.
I am an iOS developer and am fluent with web backends. So I was doing everything from iOS development to Ruby on Rails web apps. We charged by the project instead of hourly, and at one point in time, I actually earned USD $2,000 in 4 hours by completing a project in that time span.
If you work fast, charging by the project, instead of hourly can actually be beneficial.
We did this for almost 5 months to get our product off the ground, and other than being absolutely physically exhausting, it worked pretty well. Our clients were none the wiser, as we still delivered projects on time and on schedule.
We didn't really manage it well, and it was not sustainable beyond a year.
I remember feeling stressed out and exhausted all the time, having to manage client expectations and still keep working on my product.
What I would do is that I would start work at 12 p.m. everyday, and work until 12 a.m. from Monday to Saturday. Then I would crash on Sunday, and repeat the cycle.
We did this from Dec 2012 till end of Apr 2013, until our product was bringing in at least consistently four-figures a month, and we drastically scaled back on client work.
Sometime if you're not a hacker or you're one but want to focus on your startup, then taking a less "serious" job can do the trick also.
I've met we've guys that even worked night shifts in security and coded all day long. Others did even customer support from home. Got the bills paid while they build their project.
Getting a $4K a month client is something that's can take considerable amount of time to achieve.
Yeah -- to be honest we were very lucky to have the kind of client we had. One word of caution I would give is splitting your time like that can has its drawbacks. Having three weeks to focus 100% on product was an enormous help in allowing us to ship a working product as fast as we did.
I understand sometimes this just isn't possible though.
To me that seems a very good idea. Doing security at a place where you don't have to be on guard at all times (something like a receptionist job) means you can work on your product and get paid to do it with some distractions.
That's exactly what he has done. The thing is that he was a team leader in a large tech company, and could earn something like 6x in compared to the money he earned in security, if he got a full time job. But he told me that with a full time job he can't possibly develop anything for himself.
But that's not always an easy thing to do when you are 35 as he was.
The smartest person I know taught himself German and ancient Greek while working the night shift at a gas station. If you're young, that's another job with lots of down time to work on your own thing.
It's true that it's hard to balance consulting and product as a bootstrapping product startup. I used to get hung up on trying to explain how doable it is while acknowledging the pitfalls. Now I think, if you're not sure which way to go, put aside the product and just get a consulting practice up and running. Don't try to balance it. Don't worry about how you'll fit product into it.
I think you'll find that starting a product (or multiple products!) from a consulting practice is much, much easier than trying to do it by quitting a full-time W2 job. Meanwhile, probably about 40% of the work you do in your consulting practice is going to apply directly to your product company --- you'll learn to sell, to bill clients, to hire, to run payroll, and (most importantly) how to work with your team members.