I Just Quit My Full-Time Job, Now What?

Follow along the journey of a first-time entrepreneur’s adventures and ventures at www.thejaclynventures.com

Today was my last day at Conversocial. After six years of building my product marketing career and enjoying a pretty comfortable salary, I’m excited to hit pause and focus on my own ventures and adventures (hence the name “The Jaclynventures”!).

“How did you know it was the right time?!”

You’ll never know for sure when to take the leap, but there will be a time when it’s too late.

Pepper started as a fun side project to validate whether Lia and I even had a market, or if it was solely just me complaining about how today’s bras made small-chested women feel inadequate. Our Kickstarter campaign and community shouted a “hell yeah”, so it was a pretty easy decision from there.

Every second I wasn’t working on Pepper meant this problem was going unsolved or someone else was trying to solve it. But, every second I was working on Pepper also meant time and energy taken away by juggling a full time job, a side hustle, and my home life. It became unfair to Conversocial because even if I was delivering 100%, I couldn’t deliver 150% like I would want.

I had a feeling this day was going to come where I might pursue a startup project, so I’m fortunate to have saved about a year’s worth of financial runway to support myself while we bootstrap our way to the next big milestone. I won’t lie and say it’s not scary to live off my personal savings, because the thought of potentially losing everything is scary as hell, but there will always be money in the future. The worst case scenario is that I start from scratch and get a job at some cool company after this.

It’s the right time when you’re willing to risk everything to pursue your dream.

What I hope to learn

I want to take this opportunity to learn as much as I can about what it takes to turn a fun project into a real business. Even if this company goes belly up and I lose my life savings, I hope to take away lessons that only a journey like this could teach.

So here’s my promise: I will document and share everything I learn during this process as a first time, struggling entrepreneur…including stuff like:

• Process of finding health insurance
• Understanding the complicated world of customs (probably with an exclusive interview with my Mom!)
• Choosing to incorporate as an LLC vs Corporation
• Growing Pepper’s Instagram account to 2,000 followers in 2 months

The backlog list goes on!

A perspective changing lesson I’ve learned so far is that if you ask for help, people will give it to you. I am so grateful for all the people who responded “yes” to me when I cold-emailed them for advice, and for all the people who connected me to their network to get the information I needed. I want to pay it forward and be a resource for anyone who might be in the same situation as me.

You can follow along The Jaclynventures by subscribing to updates via email or Facebook.

Besides focusing on Pepper, there’s also a few things I’d like to accomplish during this time:

• Learn how to have a basic conversation in Spanish (looking for friends to practice on!)
• Dive deeper into my yoga practice and grow as a teacher…mainly to stay sane during the ups and downs
• Cook 80% of my meals, and try really hard not to go on the ramen diet. I actually love ramen, so this might be my only chance in life outside of college to consumer large quantities of it.

So with that…here we go!!