Ask HN: Part-Time Work for Founders?

I was saved by a consultancy that dropped in my lap, a foreign company looking for a local representative to manage a key account. Basically 10-20 hours a month doing some product&#x2F;marketing and account management stuff within my area of expertise but not related to my startup. It mainly just ate into my weekends, with a few meets mid-week.<p>Since then I have noticed others doing the same type of work to support themselves while their businesses are in the early stages (be it startup or trad. business).<p>Im relatively old and have a family withs kids in school, for me the hardest part of founding a startup was the financial strain. We extended way past our initial runway by not taking salaries, eroded our savings. It was difficult, but I had confidence in the business, we had responsibility to our customers* and this gig saw me through the really dark times.<p>We are a success case (our startup is seeing a lot of traction and funding now isnt an issue), but this is an area that I think needs more attention. I can imagine there were potentially great businesses that failed because of this. Startups (esp B2B ones) take time to find their feet. Older founders can eat ramen but you cant feed it to your kids.<p>PS On general advice id tend towards activities that arent too strenuous and are different to your main tasks within the startup. Eg developing part time while coding full time for your startup id imagine would be a huge drain.<p>* Our startup has an impact aspect. You couldn&#x27;t with a heart abandon it, even if you were to roll back your services in a professional manor.

I worked for about 6 months at MemSQL while we were selling our startup Theneeds (and now I have a full time job while launching SoloKeys, so I can see also the &quot;growing your startup&quot; option).<p>My experience with MemSQL has been awesome on every possible level, before, during, and after.<p>I found the job via regular application process + interview, they were searching explicitly for part-time, so I&#x27;d recommend looking for that. I strongly recommend no conflict of interests of any sort, I was doing QA at MemSQL, they knew about my startup where I was doing content recommendation&#x2F;machine learning&#x2F;backend+web.<p>Aside from money, it&#x27;s been great to work with another startup that: 1) was a US company (vs we were all Italian founders), 2) was in a more advanced stage (so, potential to learn about processes), 3) was and is full of great talented employees (so, great connections that we&#x27;re still keeping alive).

When I finally decided to make <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;officesnapshots.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;officesnapshots.com</a> be my priority, I found work through a temp agency for a while which came with some interesting experiences.<p>One memorable placement was in the shipping department of company which sold tooth whitening kits to dentists. Another was as an office manager at a cremation company sales office.<p>I actually enjoyed temping for the most part since I was able to build various skills I didn’t have before and try out different roles in companies.

A lot of startups that grow slowly use a consultancy model, offering consulting services in the area their startup is targeting, or on the Open Source tools their startup is leveraging. As you grow a product and get market fit you can slowly switch from service-oriented to product-oriented, or not, as you see fit. As I understand it, product-oriented tends to be more profitable.

- teach during weekends - fill up online surveys - start a blog - build a strategy for another startup and take stakes in return than money - review life experiences with Brands

The best kind would be using your first customer as a funding source.<p>The other, typical option is to consult for a not very demanding customer.

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