You are in a tough position. There's only two good outs that I know of: 1) Raise money and take the salary you need to support yourself. 2) Bootstrap a busine

You are in a tough position. There's only two good outs that I know of: 1) Raise money and take the salary you need to support yourself. 2) Bootstrap a business that makes enough to support yourself. To raise money you'll probably need impressive growth, you need to prove users love what you're doing (which is hard). To bootstrap you probably want to go more of the SaaS route. Build some niche thing that's easy to charge for. Look at businesses like Olark, Mibbit, Sendgrid, Clicky. Those kinds of things are (relatively) simple and people will pay good money for them. Work in the morning. Wake up early and dedicate the first 2-3 hours of your day to your "real" job and then go do your day job. Make your project small and polished. Be the easy/simple/beautiful solution. Don't compete on features. Launch within a few months, don't drag it out. Good luck.