I voted “Side project+”, but in reality I do freelance contract work on one hand and have my start-up on the other, spending time on the latter as my varying contract workload allows. The same is true of the other person most involved with the start-up.
The downside to this is that it’s taken significantly longer to get near launching than it would have done if we had been working full-time, multiple years in our case where perhaps we could have done the main development work inside a year. Naturally that can be frustrating.
The upside is that we’ve been able to manage our finances sustainably until we are nearly ready. The nature of what we’re doing means some aspects of our timetable are always going to be partly outside of our control, depending on for example how quickly we can co-ordinate other parties who are contributing or how fast various new technologies evolve and reach a useful level of adoption. Sometimes we just have to wait for things on the critical path, so I doubt we would ever have made it this far if we’d dumped the paying work and relied on some form of limited runway to switch completely.
The downside to this is that it’s taken significantly longer to get near launching than it would have done if we had been working full-time, multiple years in our case where perhaps we could have done the main development work inside a year. Naturally that can be frustrating.
The upside is that we’ve been able to manage our finances sustainably until we are nearly ready. The nature of what we’re doing means some aspects of our timetable are always going to be partly outside of our control, depending on for example how quickly we can co-ordinate other parties who are contributing or how fast various new technologies evolve and reach a useful level of adoption. Sometimes we just have to wait for things on the critical path, so I doubt we would ever have made it this far if we’d dumped the paying work and relied on some form of limited runway to switch completely.