I’m a banker getting decent pay, single, no mortgage… Should I quit my job to focus on my own business? Ive learned software development and built my MVP for a niche market. Reason was, I’m sick of office politics and forever pleasing my bosses and always trying to prove myself to them. Thinking of, if I put the same amount of energy to my own business, what could I have possibly achieved.
Currently I work full time 9-5, and work on the technology at night til 2am most time. Even weekends. Exhausting, but it worked fine. I’ve just finished building my product and ready to move on to marketing and acquiring customers. The problem is, customer acquisition would require me to be talking to customers during the day.
Pls give your advice on how have you, or would you would navigate this kind of situation. Would you quit your job?
Sounds like you need a vacation. Flights to Europe through Iceland Air are on sale tonight, take some you time. Really think about this, and most of all, think of your current job but what it would be like doing ALL the jobs at work. Are you ready? Do you have a real team together? (P.S. I like money)
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take some vacation time, and during some of those days try out the marketing/talking to customers, and see how it goes?
Basically it’s important your product is validated and is actually something users want before you quit. Unless of course, you have money to burn or as someone else said here, just come back to your job if it doesn’t work out.
Always wondered don’t companies usually have a contract that prohibits you from working on any personal projects or in the similar domain. Then how do people start businesses while working a 9-5?
Yep came here to say the same thing, go sell to a few customers on your vacation days and maybe you’ll need a few more iterations before it’s ready for prime time. Switching your side hustle to full time doesn’t have to be black and white… You’ll know when you’re ready because your day job will cost you money you could have made at your “side hustle” Hope that helps, blue skies!
Most businesses fail and most Entrepreneurs are broke.
It’s ok to work a job and don’t quit until your business is successful if you want to pursue Entrepreneurship.
Hope you understand.
Best to you
Best advice on this thread.
To add on, since you’re already have a working arrangement that you’re comfortable with, let the product bring in some revenue before you quit your job.
$1k MRR would be ideal
You know the answer to this…
Just schedule your first client meetings online and out of your time zone.
You could reason me to do the calls. I’m an engineer trying to progress into finance but starting with improving my salesman ship. I’ll do it for the experience. I’m confident and I put out fires stop selling software seems like the reasonable next step. Pls don’t ban me for bad advice.
Where did you learn software development?
Get your first customer first. $1 to $1m is a hundred times easier than $0 to $1.
Acquire your first few customers before quitting. The first few customers are the hardest to get.
I’ve been in your position before. I had golden handcuffs and I quit to start my own thingbecause I knew if i didn’t I would always wonder what if and it would eat me alive. There is a catch though. I did this before I had a family or a house to pay for. If I had those, I would not have done it. Also, if your product doesn’t work out, if you are outside your industry for a couple years it’s going to be a pain in the ass to break back in. I would call myself highly competent, but I routinely found myself in final round interviews when I tried to reenter tech following and they went with the other option because all things considered equal, would you rather the talent who has been working in tech the last 3 years, or the talent who built a logistics company over the last 3 years. So, all of this to say, I would only quit if you don’t have a family that depends on you and don’t own a house. I would also advise you to ensure you have a lot of savings to last you through a brutal hiring period should you elect to return. Good luck!
Don’t quit your day job
Golden handcuffs don’t exist. All handcuffs are just normal handcuffs painted with fake gold. You’ll see this when you get laid off, or fired for a random arbitrary reason after years of commitment.
I’ve 100% been in your shoes but gotta say, if you don’t have customers you don’t have a business, you have a hobby.
I would stop all development work on the product and sign up 10 customers. See what that process is like, see if you like it, hear their objections. You’ll find a way to take sales calls during the work day (I used to from my car at lunchtime).
If you get 10 paying customers, why not 100, why not 1,000.
Can you automate the signup process or do a self-service demo somehow? I’ve done pre-recorded videos en lieu of sales calls for a time and it worked ok.
Generally though, I would NOT just quit your job if you have zero paying customers. Ease into it. Sounds like you’ve been burning the candle at both ends for a while, and I have mad respect for that, but probably best to keep doing it a bit longer til you have some sense for what revenue of the business could really look like. Especially if you have kids and a family to support.
Stay at your soul sucking job until you know the new business can support you. That’s what I did. After about 2 years of doing both, I finally quit and did my side gig. That was 14 years ago.
Coming into this having considered this with a close friend many years ago, and the realities we saw that came up.
The very first thing you need to ask yourself is do you have a large enough nest egg to give you the runway to get a business up and running with some sort of reoccurring revenue? What is your way of monetizing? Do you have the skills needed on the development side, operations side, and business side to get you to where you need to be to make this successful.
My personal recommendation for you is to start going to various software/tech user groups in your area, especially entrepreneurial one focused on startups.