How do entrepreneurs live without a salary?

Most of the entrepreneurs I am connected with live without a salary by:

• Part time Freelancing and Consulting
• Savings
• Loans
• Living with Friends and Family

I have lived for close to 3 years with 0 salaries and for a year with a basic salary just to cover my rent and food expenses.

I have very supportive friends and family circle. Some agree with my decision and some didn’t but still, everyone supported my decision and helped me in every step.

Here is how things went for me:

• I had cut down all the expenses to just basic needs.
• Weekly 20hrs part-time work for the first 8 months to pay for expenses, intern's salary and some savings.
• I discussed quitting part-time work with my brother Deepak Mamgain and my girlfriend Bhavika Kala and they both supported me with the decision. Deepak asked me not to worry about home and said he will take care of all home expenses, loan and everything else at home.
• Stopped transferring money to home.
• Left part-time work to start Mobile & Web Chat Libraries | Applozic in order to focus on the product.
• Continued without salary as the aim was to keep as much money as possible to invest in hiring talented people and in building a great product.
• Continued paying for expenses from personal savings.
• Then, one day came when all personal savings were over.
• Reduced frequency of home town visits [from Bangalore to Dehradun].
• Used credit card for a few months.
• Converted credit card bills into EMIs.
• I had given money to some friends and family members in the past. Although it was given as help and I never thought of taking it back but being aware of my situation, they insisted and returned the money. That gave me runaway for a few more months.
• We were 8 college friends living together since 2009 in Bangalore. My friends took care of rent, food and other home expenses for a year.
• Party, outings, restaurants, etc expenses were taken care of by friends.
• Reduced my expenses on clothes, shoes, mobiles, etc to almost 0. But still, I got all of them as gifts from Bhavika Kala, actually, she got me more things than what I used to spend on my own.
• Borrowed money from friends on different occasions for various reasons such as personal expenses, server bills payment, purchasing a laptop, and sometimes salaries.
• My sisters, brother, and friends transferred money to me a couple of times whenever I went through big troubles.
• Some really good college seniors from GBPEC came forward to offer help.
• My sisters took care of depositing money into the PPF account every year. [For outside India readers: Public Provident Fund (India) — Wikipedia]
• Deepak Mamgain took care of the home expenses and loans that we had taken together.
• Applozic started making revenue and we became profitable in a year. Invested revenue back to the team, product, hiring.
• We crossed 300 paying customers with a decent growing revenue.
• I started taking a salary, not as high as I used to make 4 years back but good enough to cover up my expenses and pay back some loans.
• My friends used to create plans for a movie and paid for my tickets too. It was after 2 years that I got the chance to plan for a movie.
• I started making regular visits to the home town.
• I started paying rent and food expenses after a year.
• Returned money to friends after 2 years. I am lucky enough to have really nice friends who never asked me to return back the money and helped me without asking anything.
• Finally, started transferring money home again.