Hello HN. The fastest way to fund a startup may always be to fund it yourself. To be employed during the day, and work on the startup on nights and weekends.<p>One of the early bottlenecks with this is lack of time. You don't have as much time as you'd need to work on the startup. Which means if there was a way to quickly exchange money for time that would be something founders want.<p>Does anyone on HN want this?<p>Do you want to be employed only 3 days a week at a day job while starting your startup on the remaining 4 days?<p>Or are there enough signs that starting a startup takes over your life, and that the only conclusion from these signs is that you need to jump in fully every week, which means being employed only 3 days a week wouldn't be enough anyway?<p>If there is something here I'm missing I'd like to know it sooner than later. Thanks.
My co-founder and I, have been spending 4/5 days a week on our startup, and 1(-2 days max) a week on paid-for programming work.<p>It is really hard to find that sort of part-time paying work, especially on a long term retainer. (If anyone thinks it is easy to find such - please share!)<p>We've done it this way, because this allows us to self-fund, and carry on much longer with our idea which we always new is one that would take a longer time than most other startups to gain a breakthrough.<p>We are building stuff that would allow non-technical business users to draw their own systems into existance without programming.<p>This is a hard problem, not something to attack with the typical MVP mindset, at least not at the outset.<p>We also want the maximum time to pivot to different ways of marketing it, and applying it in different ways to try to get it to a solid financial outcome.<p>Being pressured to make money of a startup can with some technologies, lead you to make short term smart decisions that are limiting you in the longer term.<p>For those interested in what we are building:<p><a href="https://taskputty.com" rel="nofollow">https://taskputty.com</a><p>For now, we just have a CRM product, but you can alter any aspect of the system by changing process diagrams and using drag and drop editors.
I've been working full-time while pursuing passion projects in hopes of eventually starting a company. You've hit the right pain point with time being the challenge. I have frequently found myself wanting to dedicate more time to my company. However, with a family and other financial responsibilities, it's a challenge for sure. That said, I'm not prepared to give up on my dream no matter what the circumstance is. And in all honesty, working full-time does also help me to learn new things and develop skills that I need for my startup so there is a point to being employed first as opposed to just going all in.
I have been trying this out the past year. More like, get a contract gig for a 3-6 week period working on the startup stuff at night and then taking 4-8 weeks off to work on it full-time. It's a tough balancing act. I know personally for me the context switching with shorter time periods is difficult. There are so many times I want to complete a piece of functionality or fully fix a defect and not leave it in mid-stream to go work on something completely different.
I've done this a lot, usually as a consultant. Works great. I haven't found that I wanted more time for the startups - in fact, the consulting work has been a good counter balance to the startup work.