From what I've gathered from listening to and reading from a couple of very successful (at least originally) indie devs that worked alone or in small teams for

From what I've gathered from listening to and reading from a couple of very successful (at least originally) indie devs that worked alone or in small teams for quite a while: They all had a day job. Sometimes game dev related, sometimes not so much. But they all sacrificed a large portion of their free time at least until they started to generate enough money to survive on game dev alone.