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This was fairly similar to my experience - 4 months into my time off I received a letter from the government saying that due to a problem with my employer last
by lhnz 13y ago
This was fairly similar to my experience - 4 months into my time off I received a letter from the government saying that due to a problem with my employer last year I owed them thousands of pounds of tax. I might not be that risk adverse but this shocked me, and as soon as you see the end of your runway it becomes difficult to concentrate on a startup.
Also, London is expensive, remember that.
Edit: I will rinse and repeat but I definitely recommend getting a product to MVP stage before cutting your cord, as well as also having the necessary funds for this funemployment strategy to make sense - are you expecting to immediately start making enough money from the project to bootstrap it or are you going to go and get investment with your team?
Also I recommend getting into the habit of being honest and quantitative with yourself, which means getting into the habit of knocking out an excel document for your own living expenses and the commercial viability of any ideas you have.
Personally, I found myself ultimately fighting far too many battles many of which I was untested in, creating an iOS prototype while: sitting in cafes running customer development (I spoke to at least 50+ people), arranging meetings with people in the industry I wanted to disrupt, trying to attract the attention of Angels that I had connections to, getting my friends to help out with design/tech work, etc. It's a hard game and probably worth it for the experience. Something I realised was that you can't be perfectly self-sufficient - you might be an A player at a couple of things and a quick learner in others (which is how I felt) but you're going to be trying to hold so many things together that you will need a structure that supports you: finance, friendship, focus, partners. I fragilized myself by not being fully prepared for this - and also didn't have the financial situation to bide my time.
There are pools of water in the desert but you need enough water to reach them.
- basicallydan 13y ago> Edit: I will rinse and repeat but I definitely recommend getting a product to MVP stage before cutting your cord, as well as also having the necessary funds for this funemployment strategy to make sense - are you expecting to immediately start making enough money from the project to bootstrap it or are you going to go and get investment with your team? No I do not :) I have no team, nor any big business idea that I'm going to pursue that requires 6 months of work, like I said in the blog post. I have a few ideas, and maybe one or two will lead to something but maybe not. The key thing here is about learning a lot of new skills and becoming a bit more independent. Maybe I'll sacrifice that independence if/when I run out of money, but maybe I'll make money by some other means in a way which doesn't force me to sacrifice my newfound independence. I am a developer, and a lot of what I will be doing will be for fun and learning first, and for money-making reasons second Thanks for the advice though, I do appreciate it, and I will follow a lot of it. If I do decide that something might be something I want to make commercially viable, don't worry - I will take that part of it very seriously.