| Having done this (/ currently doing it), I would say: follow your heart. Taking time off to nurture your own projects is a fine and reasonable personal endeavor, but not necessarily an optimal business or financial one. In many ways, the time and space can help you explore and expand your ideas into something in the middle of the venn circles between "your happy with it" and "the market is happy with it". But, don't expect to be done with day jobs after burning through "a few $k". Depending on where you live, and who's in your network, you may be able to move to part time, agency, or freelance work after burning through your runway in order to keep enough time to work on your thing. My operating assumption with all of this is, your current day job is preventing you (in one way or another) from focusing on your own projects. This is ok. Not everyone can handle burning the candle at both ends with the day job and night-work. Figure out a way to make space for both until the personal project becomes sustainable. Beyond this, the other advice about 10-15% tech and validating your idea before hitting the code is solid. I have a single-time-purchase iOS app in the App Store, and a month or two after releasing the app, spending one day investigating blogs and websites, and one day sending tuned press release letters to them did more for my sales than any new feature I could have designed or coded in that amount of time. |