When is it the right time to go full time?
Josh
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Matty Reed@matty_reed
I wrote an article about this very question called "The Founder's Plunge".
https://medium.com/@mattyreed1/t...
Read below for an excerpt:
When is the best time to take the plunge and found a company?
The common advice is to wait until you’ve de-risked the decision by keeping your day job until the side-gig has sufficient revenue and growth. This way you never lose your income, and the transition to entrepreneurship is organic and smooth.
Unfortunately, this advice didn’t work for me.
My full-time job was just that: full-time. I chose a career that did not include the luxury of free time.
Sure, I worked most weekends on my passion project, but a full-day of work every day, Monday thru Friday, left me exhausted and lacking the energy to work much during the week.
This means at best, I could put in 20 hours of work on my passion project.
The problem is, during the day I competed with people more passionate about my day job than I was, and at night I competed with people who poured an entire week’s worth of time and energy into their passion project.
My plan B was someone else’s plan A.
Thanks to this predicament, I was doomed to never quite de-risk the decision to take the plunge. My time and energy was split such that I would not master either pursuit in any realistic time frame. For years, I existed in this limbo.
Then one day, I reframed the risk equation.
It was no longer about cash flow and probability of success. The risk of losing income was a rounding error compared to the risk of losing another year of my life stuck in limbo.
The time to found a company was not when I had sufficient revenue and a clear path to success.
The time was now.
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Going full-time on your startup is a big step. Consider doing it when your business has steady income and you’re confident in your plan.