[penguin_gab]

My team and I also tried this same approach for my mobile education startup - but differently.

The issue with working one week on, and three weeks off is that the client is willing to accommodate you flying off the radar for three weeks, and that makes it hard for them to plan their product according to your timing.

What we tried at App Ninja was to work a normal six day week, 12 hours a day. We would work on our product for the first 8 hours of the day, and the remaining 4 hours, we will work on our client projects.

I am an iOS developer and am fluent with web backends. So I was doing everything from iOS development to Ruby on Rails web apps. We charged by the project instead of hourly, and at one point in time, I actually earned USD $2,000 in 4 hours by completing a project in that time span.

If you work fast, charging by the project, instead of hourly can actually be beneficial.

We did this for almost 5 months to get our product off the ground, and other than being absolutely physically exhausting, it worked pretty well. Our clients were none the wiser, as we still delivered projects on time and on schedule.

[skrebbel]

> What we tried at App Ninja was to work a normal six day week, 12 hours a day.

Is this normal in the US?

(Note: I'm not cynical, I'm European - I really don't know anything about the culture you guys have over there)

[Kiro]

Working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week sounds hard. How did you manage?

[penguin_gab]

We didn't really manage it well, and it was not sustainable beyond a year.

I remember feeling stressed out and exhausted all the time, having to manage client expectations and still keep working on my product.

What I would do is that I would start work at 12 p.m. everyday, and work until 12 a.m. from Monday to Saturday. Then I would crash on Sunday, and repeat the cycle.

We did this from Dec 2012 till end of Apr 2013, until our product was bringing in at least consistently four-figures a month, and we drastically scaled back on client work.