For 3 years, I've been bootstrapping and signing up early adopters to be able to pay for developers to build out my SaaS product. The development process has been the "kink in the hose" so I've been working a decently paid full-time job while it gets built. My schedule was not holding up the progress since it was all development (and I'm not a developer). But within the next three months, we will have finished the build and will be delivering the product to our first three customers.
At that point, I have to assume that my schedule WILL be what is holding us up - and that doesn't sit well with me. How should I plan for this? What are the options?
No matter how you slice it, you'll be taking a risk. What's tough about this transition is that -- although you can do the math and attempt to project your income in both scenarios -- what you cannot quantify is how much your startup will benefit from the free mindspace you will have when you're no longer spending most of your day in a full-time job.
That part is a bit of a "leap of faith."
When I was considering quitting my comfortable Director of Marketing role to dedicate my days to what has now become my digital agency of 6+ years, a mentor of mine plotted out a simple graph for me. Time on the X-axis, income on the Y-axis, and 2 lines: the first one representing how income level would grow if I stayed in a traditional career, being promoted every so often, steadily growing, etc. The second line reflected my income as an entrepreneur. In the first few years, that line sucked. But pretty soon, with hard work and a little luck, it might grow sharply, and there could come a point where it intersected and grew far beyond what the "safe and steady" line could offer.
As it turns out, that's exactly what happened in my life -- and it didn't take all that long in the end.
This is obviously different for everyone and there are no guarantees, but I'm sharing this because I found it to be a useful way to look at the risk vs. reward of leaving stable employment to focus 100% on growing something new and fragile.
