It's possible, but really hard, especially if you have a family. And actually, building a product in your free time isn't that rough; it's supporting it that wi

It's possible, but really hard, especially if you have a family. And actually, building a product in your free time isn't that rough; it's supporting it that will consume all of your free time. Think about it, let's say you have a perfectly reasonable 40 hour work week. What would be a good extra amount to put into a side project/startup? 20 hours? Now you're working 60 hours per week, just under an extra 3 hours per night. How long can you keep that up? How much time will that take away from your family? Let's say you stick it through and launch. The questions and support emails roll in. How much of that will eat up your extra 20 hours per week to work on bugs and new features? And will your customers be ok with waiting the extra time while you slog away at your day job? And what happens if that 40 hour/week job goes into crunch mode and goes up to 50 or maybe even more? Doing this isn't necessarily hard in terms of difficulty, but it does take a LOT of time.