by driven20 on 6/9/19, 11:18 PM with 120 comments
Options:
#1 Spend my time studying and finding a new job in NYC. I'm pretty confident that if I spend my time on leetCode and networking I will land a good job. I feel like this is the safe route.
#2 Spend my time pursuing a couple ideas I have. It's nothing new or innovating, a productivity app and a yelp like service working with small businesses. Reading all the content here is super motivating and inspiring, I feel like I could make these ideas work, but it's also super risky. I don't want to spend 1-2 years working on these ideas only to look up and realized I wasted my time and money.
#3 Some combination of both? I was thinking that I can pursue my side projects and look for a new job at the same time. However, I feel like having a clear focus on one thing is important.
by rubicon33 on 6/10/19, 1:13 AM
I decided for a totally different option, lets call it option #4:
#4 Take an "easy" programming job and use your spare time on nights/weekends to build a software business.
I chose this option because I wasn't willing to risk my savings. Plain and simple. I want to retire some day, and blowing 60k for a ~5% chance at making a profitable business wasn't worth it to me.
by gwbas1c on 6/10/19, 1:24 AM
When I was single, a full time job and side projects were perfectly fine. Once I met my wife, I didn't have a lot of time for side projects. The relationship just took over my nights and weekends. Kids sap up most of the time now.
So, IMO:
#3 if you ever find yourself single again.
#2 before you have kids and a mortgage. This will only work if you have a good business mind or a girlfriend who's willing to help you make ends meet. If she really wants to start a family and be a full-time homemaker, it'll put a bigger strain on your relationship than you realize.
And, honestly, there's nothing wrong with #1. After quitting my job when I was 28 and in a similar situation; then getting a job right before my 30th birthday, what I can say is that carefully choosing your employer is the most important career skill to have in your situation. It takes almost a decade bouncing from jobs to know how to recognize (and stick with) a good situation, how to recognize a bad situation in the interview.
That being said, there's nothing wrong with taking 1-2 months off between jobs!
by fouc on 6/10/19, 1:29 AM
Forcing yourself to launch/ship a few products each within a month could be good training to not get stuck in idea phase or coding phase, and focus on getting it out. Then you can try judging how the responses are, maybe 1 will take off and the rest won't.
If you're spending a longer time developing out an idea, it's hard to actually know if the market wants it or not, unless you have actual real paying customers. So for example that yelp idea you should be aiming to have paid customers within 3 months anyways.. reduce risk by making the right moves, not hoping that you might have paid customers 1-2 years later.
by zaqwsxcde12 on 6/10/19, 7:56 AM
by ecesena on 6/10/19, 3:02 AM
In your shoes, I'd first get a job, possibly more sustainable than your previous one. Then I'd start working on my side project trying to make a second income stream. BTW, startup school is starting soon, you should definitely join in and test yourself for 10 weeks.
by throw51319 on 6/10/19, 1:43 PM
Get back, move into a cheap shared studio or 1br with your gf. Work on your stuff after 5:30 and still bank money, and still live in the city. Boom.
by jf22 on 6/9/19, 11:58 PM
Productivity apps and yelp like services are a dime a dozen.
You'll probably waste 1-2 years, and expect to waste 3-5 more before you can replace your main source of income.
Entrepreneurship is risky and developing software is the easy part.
by andrewstuart on 6/10/19, 1:07 AM
You don't have runway - you have the savings to buy a house, or form the foundation for the next stage of your life.
If you build your business whilst you have a source of income then you have infinite runway - you can keep trying until your dying day or you give up.
It's only after you've tried to build your social network for dogs and failed that you look back and say "wow, that $120,000 was actually ALOT of money - it's going to take me years to make that again". AND now you don't have money to build your next great idea - Uber for petwalking.
Using your savings as "runway" is just gambling with unlikely odds.
Any "runway" that can keep you going for a year in a modern western city is ALOT of money - you're really undervaluing that money if you use it just to live whilst creating a business. And you're also assuming that you're going to be able to make that same amount of money just as easily another time - that may or may not be true at all.
by takanori on 6/10/19, 12:02 AM
by gexla on 6/10/19, 5:28 AM
Some people seem to have a knack for getting right to the point of what needs to be done in hustling an idea and making money on it. For others, it's way too easy to spin the tires and get nowhere for weeks, then months on end. At a certain point, the feeling of getting nowhere becomes a drain itself and the likelihood of not finishing grows.
You don't want to find out which category you are in while burning through savings. Better to start with constraints which force that sense of urgency (lack of time.)
by akulbe on 6/9/19, 11:26 PM
by scarface74 on 6/10/19, 1:48 AM
Con: Statistically, you will fail. There are people out there with the same idea that are better funded, better connected and can move faster.
Pro: Internet projects are cheap. Infrastructure is cheap. Give me a $200/month budget , I could easily host your typical small software as a service app starting off with plenty of headroom.
Split the difference: Work and work on your side project. Even if you fail, you still have something to add to your portfolio.
by z3t4 on 6/10/19, 8:26 AM
But you probably don't want to do it alone. It's better to own 10% of something, then 100% of nothing. Also validate your ideas before doing actual work. For example do a kick-starter, or a signup-page, pitch the idea to possible customers.
by amorphous on 6/10/19, 5:02 PM
by sixtypoundhound on 6/10/19, 1:05 AM
If you're selling primarily to a NYC audience or industry, then move there of course - get close to the customer. Otherwise you've got a lot more runway in the South....
by jhabdas on 6/10/19, 8:17 AM
- Travel as soon as possible. The world will speak to you in ways a computer never can.
- If you don't go back to work right away, you may be looked at as less reliable to HR department and hiring managers later.
- If you do choose not to go back to work right away, you need to consider the opportunity cost of not getting involved with someone else's start-up right away.
- If you and your girlfriend want to move to a city, be sure she has an opportunity there to save the relationship in the case your your entrepreneurial interests don't pan out.
All of the options you suggested will likely lead to to future burn out if you don't move to a larger company. Find a job you kinda like and stay put for awhile go gain experience and relationships, and place a rock in your resume. Then you can pursue your dreams if you're able to save more or dramatically reduce cost of living relative to a city.
by sebastianconcpt on 6/10/19, 1:12 AM
by jameslk on 6/10/19, 1:36 AM
Once you have cash flow, start with trying to sell your idea before you build it. If anyone wants your idea, hire others to help you build it and sell it. Your contract cash flow will allow you to trade your time for other's who will have skills you don't have.
by epc on 6/10/19, 1:15 AM
I love living in NYC, have been here for 20+ years. But your $60k will disappear rapidly. If you want to be in the NYC metro area while you look for a job pick a suburb on a train line about an hour out of the City (NJ, NY east of the Hudson, maybe Long Island). Your burn rate will be much less but you'll be able to get into Manhattan and nearby business districts in a predictable amount of time for interviews and networking events (no recommendation on the train line but avoid the single track train lines).
by mntmoss on 6/10/19, 12:49 AM
If you can easily re-prioritize your tasks because abstract feedback mechanisms tell you so, and you can steel yourself to strategize and make competitive choices under pressure, even when it means you may make a tradeoff that hurts someone personally, you're in a pretty good position to operate a business around any promising opportunity, and to scale it up if needed. That doesn't mean "businesspeople should be immoral," but rather "they are able to make genuinely tough decisions in an impersonal and fair manner, and are numbed to the painful parts where the livelihood of the business depends on it." (Acid test: how ruthless are you when playing board games?)
But if your mindset is more prone to meandering and getting fixated on specific problems and you get propelled by events and emotional energy around you - whether or not that adds up to a diagnosable condition, don't kid yourself. You can have a business, but it should match your personality and complement your strengths and weaknesses, and you might need a co-founder to keep you grounded. Otherwise you'll shut down or divert yourself into solving the wrong problem as soon as it gets hard.
And to some extent, controlling those thoughts and feelings is something you can train up, and finding an appropriate co-founder is something you can achieve by sheer peristence, but it really sits near the top of the heap in terms of whether a commercial project with paying customers and possibly employees will be the sound thing to pursue, because there are all sorts of ways to rationalize yourself into a bad plan.
If you don't think you can do it that way, you can instead pursue a side project with the intent of turning it into your next gig - something that will at least market your skills and dreams and keep you employable even if you do not have a clue of how it would operate at scale or over the long run. And that might be preferable to grinding LeetCode.
by loso on 6/10/19, 2:12 AM
by WheelsAtLarge on 6/10/19, 6:41 PM
by smt88 on 6/10/19, 12:30 AM
by sheeshkebab on 6/10/19, 1:18 AM
Also, if you do get a job in nyc area - try for one that pays multiple of whatever you were making down south.
by panchicore3 on 6/10/19, 12:50 AM
by duxup on 6/10/19, 3:15 AM
by x0x0 on 6/10/19, 12:33 AM
>[...] I feel like I could make these ideas work, but it's also super risky. I don't want to spend 1-2 years working on these ideas only to look up and realized I wasted my time and money.
If you can't get comfortable with that risk, you're going to have a very hard time being an entrepreneur.
There's always people who luck into an amazing business and business model, but realistically, you're going to have to put some resources in before you figure out if there's value. Even if it's just mocks and time spent talking to folks (do both those before coding anything though!)
Oh, and yelp is a terrible business -- the coding is straightforward. Your problem there is entirely how do you seed a site with reviews and businesses. Typically, two-sided marketplaces are some of the hardest businesses to create.
by mooreds on 6/10/19, 11:44 AM
Then I think you need to think about where you want to go in your career. Do you enjoy development and want to do nothing else? Don't start a business, because you'll end up doing a lot of other things. Are you interested in the control and passionate about your solution of your own business? Then start a company.
Note that there's many other routes, some outlined in other comments. In particular I spent years as a contractor/consultant on my own. It paid the bills and gave me a ton of freedom.
by xervyn on 6/10/19, 12:52 AM
by aklemm on 6/10/19, 1:08 AM
#4 Partner in as a tech lead or cofounder on someone else’s early stage idea.
The question is how to find that person. Angle list? Product Hunt? Who has some ideas?
I think once you’re working among the right group, you might find more startup founders to work with in a way that is inline with what you seem to want.
by throw03172019 on 6/9/19, 11:42 PM
#3 or #2.
You could also attempt to build an MVP (#2) and try to raise a small amount of money so you can de-risk yourself a bit.
by wolco on 6/10/19, 6:48 AM
Neither.
You are burned out. Rest / have some fun and fall in love. When an idea hits you run with it. If nothing inspires you and you get bored with rest go find a job.
by jammygit on 6/10/19, 1:26 AM
Badly wanting to be convinced otherwise though, but it’s hard when people are depending on you...
by aj-4 on 6/10/19, 5:08 PM
by jakobegger on 6/10/19, 8:09 PM
by kjgkjhfkjf on 6/10/19, 12:35 AM
by usgroup on 6/10/19, 7:21 AM
Otherwise, get a job.
by mettamage on 6/10/19, 1:23 AM
Some hopefully helpful thoughts:
1) Is it for fun or profit? You can't have both motivations
One thing you should think about with #2 is the overjustification effect [1]. I think there's a cognitive dissonance effect at play [2]. In practical terms, ask yourself: are you having a side project because you like to do it, or because you want to make money and "scratching your own itch" is simply a marketing tactic of understanding your users? If you say: well, both! Then you're prone to the overjustification effect and you might sap a lot of intrinsic motivation away.
2) Generalists tend to earn less money
There was a recent thread on HN that made me believe that specialists will fare better in big(ger) companies and generalists will fare better in small ones. Since big(ger) companies tend to have more resources, specialists tend to be paid better salaries. I presume your entrepreneurial motivation is in part financial. Being an entrepreneur prepares you to be a generalist [3].
3) With that said more motivated people are more competitive and earn more
This is a bit of a tricky one. It has been my observation that CS students who enrolled into university and were passioned about coding tended to be more competitive on the job market than the average CS student (if I have to believe my LinkedIn, which has +500 connections and +100 recent graduated programmers on it).
One confounding factor, however, with competition is not that you simply have to be motivated. There is a certain baseline of motivation depending on whom your competition is. For example, the gaming industry is a more competitive industry simply because employees are more motivated (I read it somewhere, I do not have the source). Another confounding factor is that the distribution of wealth regarding an industry matters. If you are the 50th percentile earner in the compiler industry, you'll earn a lot more than if you are the 50th percentile earner in the game development industry (with its many indie companies that are underfunded).
What I described here I'd equate as (with the strong assumption that people their ability to learn is similar and they are at a similar level as you):
wealth = motivation_percentile * wealth_distribution_percentile
motivation_percentile: your motivation ranked to that of peers who are in the same industry. A simple metric is: amount of hours worked on relatively high focus.
This is a long way of saying: do you know how motivated you are compared to your competition? And do you know the wealth distribution of what job and/or app you're getting into? In terms of entrepreneurship on wealth distribution: education is less lucrative than healthcare, for example. A heuristic following from this: if you can find a boring industry that you're excited by, then your chances of success are higher.
4) How many product market fits are you able to validate?
It took Rovio games 52 games in order to produce Angry Birds [4]. I am not sure if this is a fair comparison as many industries are different and the average amount of tries to make it big can vary. However, based on stories of most entrepreneurs, I think it is safe to assume that this number tends to be bigger than 10. I hope other people could get some good statistics on this, I couldn't find any.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
[2] https://youtu.be/h6HLDV0T5Q8?t=488
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20094242
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovio_Entertainment#cite_note-...
by achingtooth on 6/10/19, 6:26 AM
by ronilan on 6/10/19, 12:15 AM
From “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” by Mary Schmich
by terrycody on 6/10/19, 12:56 AM
Do you know PHP and wordpress? I personally have a very big project idea, but only need a very very high level technique involving design a wordpress plugin using PHP, if this can be done, it would be a very good side project and passive. (no need big investment, the plugin is the main goal)
good luck to u and your family.