Signs you should quit your day job and pursue your side hustle full time

Clipchamp’s CEO and co-founder Alexander Dreiling took his side hustle and turned it into a successful startup. Here he reflects on the moment he knew he had to turn his side project into a business.

Deciding when to quit your day job in pursuit of growing your side hustle is possibly the biggest question many entrepreneurs will face. It was not so long ago that I was asking myself this same question. I was sitting in my garage with my university friend Soeren, working on our vision for revolutionising the video industry with powerful browser based video compression. After weighing up the risks with the potential benefits, I realised that we could actually turn this side project of ours into a real business. Here are the three major things that lead me to quit my day job and embrace the #startuplife.

You gotta have faith

It takes a lot of courage to turn your side hustle into your primary source of income. No matter how much faith you have in your own startup however, it won’t take off unless others believe in it too. A strong indicator of success is whether or not other people believe in your vision and are willing to invest in your business.

“Investors are often hardwired to say no.”

While investors are often hardwired to say ‘no’, they can give great insight as to why your business model might not work and where you can improve. We received invaluable feedback from many investors along our Clipchamp journey that helped us to hone our idea and perfect our pitching skills. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. It might be the first time, it might be the tenth time, but eventually your pitch will land in front of the right investor at the right time.

These users are loyal

At an earlier stage of the journey we knew from our analytics that we had a few hundred thousand people on our platform every single month. We then went one step further and asked our users to log in before they could have access to our product. While it made a lot of sense for us for a number of reasons to introduce a log-in requirement, this could have potentially presented a major barrier to conversion.

“Our users saw value in our unique product.”

However as we quickly found out, aside from a very small number of disgruntled messages, the vast majority of people did not mind the log-in. This was a strong indication that enough users saw enough value in what we had to offer to not mind the small extra hurdle.

Usage statistics combined with logging-in allowed us to determine that we had lots of returning users, another strong point of evidence that our product was valuable to them.

Finding a viable business model

The moment we saw the prospect of a viable business model, that was the moment we realised that we could turn our side-project into a real business. This was also the time we decided to complement our initially free tool with a choice of free and paid tiers. Introducing a freemium model helped to find out about people’s willingness to pay for our services.

We were then being asked more and more often for other paid products around our capabilities, such as the video API. That’s when we realised that we had something that others don’t have, and that people were willing to pay for it.

“People were willing to pay for it.”

To quit or not to quit?

If you get to a certain inflection point you have to make a pretty fundamental decision — are you going to keep treating your startup as an activity on the side where it might fizzle out fairly soon or are you going to pour all your heart & soul into it to give it the attention it requires to make it a success?

That point comes for most when you start generating revenue and have to start taking your customers’ needs more seriously than you might have before. You then have to start investing into support, additional product development, marketing and all the rest. It moves away from just being your hobby and becomes more of a professional activity.

That’s the situation we found ourselves in after working on Clipchamp for the first couple of months and decided to give it a proper go.

So if you’re willing to go all in and if the signs seem right then go for it!

Clipchamp is the world’s first browser-based video tool suite. We are changing the way people share video by making video compression, conversion, editing and recording fast and easy. Find us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.