To Quit or Not Quit
Often people ask me if they should quit their jobs. It’s a question every entrepreneur asks themselves as they start getting very passionate about their idea. It’s a tough question to answer and if you haven’t tried working on your idea parttime, then your answer might be: “I will work on my idea part time until I see some movement in the positive direction”, but you’ll soon realize that it’s much harder than you had thought. It’s hard to find the balance between your job, your idea, and rest. And it’s even harder to develop both your product and business.
The truth is, you won’t have the flexibility and the risk tolerance of someone who outright quits their job, but you won’t have the money to survive the development phase if you do. There is a parttime solution to this parttime dilemma and its a simple mathematical one.
If you were to quit your job tomorrow, you would go from a salary of x to a salary of zero. The key is you can find a developer in the east that would work for a salary of x/4 who is just as capable as you are, if not better, at development. So why not reduce your salary by 1/4 and just hire someone to work for you. You still have an income and you have increased your man-hours dramatically. You can concentrate on developing the business, while your hire can concentrate on development. I will cover outsourcing in a later post.
As always, comments are appreciated.
June 1st, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Great Post! I think the biggest ‘fear’ most developers have is loosing their baby; maybe its the realization that you need to spend your time designing and documenting your idea so someone can build it for you.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:23 am
Thats definitely true. I’ve met alot of ppl who are afraid to share their ideas when they are starting out. Telling people your idea can really help you out. Getting someone else’s perspective really helps.