[zemote]

I started out keeping the day job and building on the side. After awhile it gets old and you lose all motivation for the day job. Since moving to working on the startup full time I have never been happier in my life. I wake up every day living the dream and have no plans on looking back. Unfortunately my co-founder is still working a day job, but we are close to getting him working full time on our little project.

[rajasaur]

+1 Im not sure how someone can do justice to the day job as well as the side projects. Over a period of time, you start thinking about your side project during the day job and vice versa.

IMO, having more than one job is just going to split your thoughts and wouldnt help much in either of them.

[bad_user]

> IMO, having more than one job is just going to split your thoughts and wouldnt help much in either of them.

It is true that it is going to split your thoughts and it gets really, really tiring.

But it can help if in your job-related projects you start seeing patterns of what people want, how to please them, how to talk to them to get details about their business that they forgot to mention, etc ...

The implementation of your side-projects suffers for sure, but you can gain a lot of knowledge from your social interactions with clients. I used to hate consultancy work for many reasons, but the bottom line is that I learned a lot too.

I guess the answer to this question (quitting your day-job or not) is the same useless and moronic answer given to all things complicated ... it depends.

[tiffani]

Hahaa...that's definitely happening to me now. I find myself sneaking out to my car making calls to potential clients to schedule demos, etc. You do lose motivation and the mind wanders... :(

[ahoyhere]

I think that doing consulting while doing the side project -- which is what they did, and we're doing -- is much more manageable.

For most consulting agencies, there's no single client you always work with, so you have more variety of projects, less drudgery. And, assuming your field is related to your project, it's more likely that the consulting work will feed back into learning things that help you build your own stuff.

It's still pretty annoying, of course. Especially doing customer support for our side project is problematic.

But I personally think that doing our own projects has helped us get better, easier-to-work-with clients.

And if we had tried to force Freckle to pay our bills (there are four of us) right away, we would have had to make many more compromises than we have.

On the balance, I'd say we could be dealing better with the situation, but I certainly wouldn't have done the quit-the-dayjob thing myself.