| I did this for three months with Geddit, but mostly on creating the MVP with my cofounder rather than sales. Unlike mindcrime, my employer did not know what else I was working on, and I did no work on my startup during 9-5 business hours. I had to keep everything absolutely separate - not so much as IMing my cofounder about the startup during working hours. I did keep a personal journal a work where I would write down ideas and other startup related things, as well as general thoughts, but that was it. The 9-5 job was mind numbingly boring, and occasionally pretty stressful. I developed some tactics to make sure I kept going with the startup while still doing my 9-5 well. Firstly, I developed a routine together with my cofounder, and stuck to it religiously. 9 to 5, we were at our day jobs. 6 to 7 we were at the gym. 8pm we had had dinner and were ready to work on a weeknight. Work had a midnight curfew, no matter what. This helped to establish compartmentalised parts of the day, as well as an effective transition between one and the other. At my 9-5, I could focus on my job since I knew no startup business would enter. Weekends were devoted entirely to startup work, or leisure activities about twice a month. Secondly, we established a goal where we could switch to working on the startup full time. For us this was saving the money needed to move to Berlin plus 6 months runway. Having this in our sights made the harder parts of the three months more bearable because we knew we were working toward a determined fixed goal. We were able to execute on our MVP through this sort of discipline and successfully switched to working full time on Geddit. This stuff was very tough, but I had the support of my awesome cofounder and we had each other's backs. If you're going at this alone your mileage may vary, but we managed to succeed on the 'nights and weekends' route, at least for some time. Eventually you'll have to switch to working on your idea full time - probably sooner than you feel comfortable - but it'll be worth it. |