Quit Your Job and Focus On Your Startup The Right Way
You are working a corporate job from 9:00am–5:00pm and a startup business from 5:00pm–2:00am. It is not easy but you will make progress. After all work is work and you are doing something, which is always better then nothing. But, you will be distracted. Your startup business will not have your full attention and for that it will suffer. There is an answer though. Quit your job and focus on your startup. Here are some thoughts on doing just that.
This article was originally published on Siskar.co
1. You Need to Raise Capital
Adeo Ressi, CEO of the Founder Institute says “It’s important to quit your day job. I recently got an update from a graduate. Their company failed to raise capital and his day job was getting harder, so he had to close his startup. This comes as no surprise, since I have never heard of any startup that was able to raise professional angel money while the Founder was still employed. Furthermore, it’s nearly impossible to dedicate the time and mental energy necessary to gain traction in the marketplace for your product while working for another company.”
2. Quitting Your Job Is The Next Step to Success
Mohamed Kamal, Co-Founder and Head of Product for Gigturn adds, “Adeo is completely right. I bombed two investors meetings because I had a day job. Here’s the cold truth: Deciding you want to quit is usually just the first move in a long and cerebral chess match you’ll play with yourself. I’ve found that a founder’s inability to quit their current day jobs had little to do with the perceived riskiness of their new startups, their financial situation, or general economic conditions. The real barrier for most of us is not external. It’s our own psychology — we:
- Overthink decisions
- Fear eventual failure
- Prioritize near-term, visible rewards over long-range success.
I found myself hesitating in front of an email send button. It was my resignation email which took three hours to write. Sending it was the ultimate mind hack.”
3. There’s No Such Thing as “Perfect Timing”
“My experience was similar, but with an extra ingredient… when I was about to quit my job my wife was diagnosed with cancer so it was an even harder decision. I talked to one of my advisors and he asked me, ‘When do you think it’s the perfect time to start your company? There will always be a problem out there, you just have to choose if you want to do it or not.’ I then talked back to my wife and asked her if she would support me in case I didn’t raise enough money to live for a year and she agreed.
Now she has no cancer, we are about to receive new funds and the business looks promising. If I hadn’t taken that decision in that apparently insane moment, none of this would be happening, so I really appreciate her faith in the project and the words from my advisor.” — Sebastian Wilson, CEO at Luminux.cl.
4. Minimize Distractions to Reduce Mistakes
Tom Walpole, Co-Founder of Wembli, says “I have a meeting in about 3 hrs today to tell my employer I intend to focus on my startup full time. It’s a mind hack! In our situation, my co-founder happens to be my wife (they say co-founding is a marriage anyway right?!) — arriving at the decision that this is not only best for our business but also our family has definitely been a challenge, but at the same time a good measure of our ability to work as a team (in life and business) as well as an exercise in trust and support for each other.
I’ve spent the last 18 months developing, collecting user feedback and then developing again. Although that cycle never ends, it has come to a head where we have a refined enough product to start spending serious marketing money to grow it makes sense to us that we should minimize distractions which will hopefully reduce our mistakes and get more for our money.”
5. Part-Time Work May be a Better Option
“Whilst I was in FI I quit my day job to focus on my startup. It was the right decision. In order to fund day to day living I was just going off savings but I’ve also been fortunate in picking up some part time consultancy gigs which is a bonus. By consulting to the right companies I’ve also been exposed to some other contacts including investors so that’s good too. Up until the product was available (in my case) the consultancy has worked great. Now that the site is live my work is cut out for me as I hustle away the plan is to focus on Oddswop and fundraising.” — Yvonne Lee, Founder of Oddswop.
6. You Fail Faster
“The thing about having a job is that you don’t have the ability to fail fast. An unemployed founder has the entire day to meet partners and customers but an employed founder only has a few hours per day after work. And that’s assuming that people actually want to talk to you after working hours, instead of spending it with their families.
An unemployed founder has a fixed amount of money, so that forces the founder to really focus on being cost efficient. An employed founder, however, has a steady monthly salary so naturally it’s harder to focus because that founder can literally afford to do so. That means that what takes an unemployed founder 2 weeks to learn may very well take an employed founder 2 months. Compound that and you may end up spending years of your life on something that doesn’t work.” — Elisha Tan, Founder of Learnemy.
7. You have to Constantly Deliver
According to Goran Candrlic, Co-Founder of Webiny: “We are scaling our product and team by doing consulting jobs. It’s easier but it’s constantly selling and delivering. So far we’re alive and getting our core business up and running day by day.”
8. The Devil’s Advocate
Ramzi Zahra, Founder of Service List had some counter points to offer though. “I’d agree with the quit your job sooner then later theory however there are a few important matters to factor-in that are often forgotten. We can all agree that without putting the effort in a startup then it is likely that it will fail so you have a few choices:
1. Do it slow — Work on your start-up part-time/casually whilst keeping your day job.
2. Do it fast — Quit your day job to work on your startup.
An innate nature in humans is rush, they want results and they want it now. However to make the best decision it will depend on the grad’s situation:
a. Stage of the startup — Early stage work is different than traction, funding, etc.
b. Financial situation — Can the founder afford to live without funding for a while?
I believe it is vital to factor the two points above to get the answer that is best for each situation. The second point is really critical. I personally quit my job to work on a startup however I soon found myself distracted with having to get some money in the door to pay rent/food/expenses. The startup was not “officially” launched yet and I was no where near raising funding. I chose to do some web development on the side to get by however it took a fair bit of time of my day. So did I really “quit” my day job? Some might argue that I didn’t. In summary, Adeo’s point is spot on however it cannot be used as a blanket rule and is more geared towards founders that are ready for funding.”
These Medium posts are just the tip of the iceberg. If you liked this post, subscribe to Kevin Siskar’s Weekly Newsletter to get instant access to much more.
