For background, I am a 25 year old Software Engineer who works the corporate life. My company is moving to force engineers to work in person and I just do not want to keep working my life away. The pay is very high and benefits are great, but I know in the end, I want the flexibility of working for myself.
I have opened up some businesses in the past with mixed success. I want to open up a startup that can generate passive income, be a secure investment, and not require too much overhead. I have tried some eCommerce businesses in the past and even worked on a B2B marketplace like Alibaba in Asia.
I really have very little personal expenses since my house and cars are paid off. I have about 100k in savings that I can use for the startup.
I am facing a few issues:
Between long commutes and 8 hour work days, I have very little energy to work on a startup in my free time. Weekends and Off days are always just reserved for running errands and I have absolutely no time on weekdays. Should I quit my job?
The second issue I am facing is that there are so many different places to start. A physical laundromat business, a physical car wash, an online store, or a good old fashioned Computer Science startup. Any Advice on what to start would be greatly appreciated.
Lastly, finding a good business partner to help take some overhead is always a big problem that has caused me some headache in the past.
As a serial entrepreneur with two exits and 10 years doing it as a software engineer the best advice I can give you is, if you don’t have time now, while working a full time job it will be hard for you as a startup. Basically being an entrepreneur is working 100 hour weeks, alone for no pay, if your startup makes 20k in the first year it’s a success and it’s a hustle every day. The reality is that 95% of startups fail, so you go into knowing that and being comfortable with that, you will be ok, but you just don’t make something cool and people will come, timing and marketing are hugely critical skills. Building the right solution will take a lot of iteration and pivots, having an MVP out early and getting paid customers before you make any big decisions is the best strategy, if your not embarrassed by your first product you launched to late. Now if you go into this knowing your going to fail and why do it, well this is my why, it’s about growth personally, I’m an amazing software developer, I can make anything, but leadership, marketing, promotion and a ton of other skills I didn’t have while working for someone else, and I wanted freedom over financial success. Starting your own company is the hardest thing you can do, but without change you won’t grow and I’m a firm believer that you have one life to live and I don’t want to live with regrets. It took 2 years to get a salary over 20k, when I left a job making 350k a year that was a big change, but year 3 it started to grow and so did I. Also don’t go into it thinking you will raise millions the reality is that starting out, I didn’t raise 2M until I was at 2M in revenue and it was still hard, it gets easier but raising money is in reality joining an elite club, you are an outsider and not proven, you won’t get your VC membership card until you can make a lot of money, then they will let you in. You will fail, there are a lot going against you but learn as much as possible, get your solution out and iterate on it when it’s making money, and solve an easy and scalable problem, it might be something unsexy but making money is what it’s all about and it’s slow with a lot of ups and downs.