Life got very interesting one and a half months ago. I had a meeting with my employer where he sat me down and asked me if GridSpy was ready to survive without my salary. Essentially he asked me if I was ready to leave and take GridSpy full-time. Being an VC funded entrepreneur himself he knew how hard it is to make that initial leap into full-time start-up and gave me a gentle nudge “out of the nest.”

After that meeting my mind was racing. My wife and I agreed that taking GridSpy full-time was absolutely exciting but equally frightening. We’ve been tightening our belts for some time to get ready for bootstrapping but even we don’t know how soon GridSpy will transition from a ‘sure thing’ to a trading business. I assured her that I could land on my feet with a contracting job should the money run out.

So with much trepidation I decided that it indeed was the time to leave.

With a month’s notice given, I served out the notice period with tense anticipation, mostly worrying about the money. It turned out that the money problem soon solved itself. A friend of the family runs a stealth start-up which now had need of a contract programmer, and it was suggested to him that I would fill the role..

So the plan was to serve out my notice and start the contract after a well deserved full-time month on GridSpy. It soon came to be that my new client had an urgent need for my services – arguably more urgent than our own start-up for at least a couple of weeks. As a founder, it was a real heart wrenching experience. With complete control over my time I have decided that cash in the hand now to build initial stock is worth delaying our product just that little bit longer. I’ve also had a nice little splurge, for instance getting the required noise cancelling headphones.

It has been four weeks now since my last day as a salaried employee and I’ve had a great time. For the first time in ages overtime has been optional, working conditions are in my control, and opportunities are endless. However, the opportunities being endless thing has taken me away a little, well a lot, from GridSpy. These last four weeks have been great for my client but not so great for GridSpy. I have really enjoyed the programming challenges of the contract work, but I really haven’t spent any more time on GridSpy than I would have before. I seem to have exchanged one full-time job for another. Again I appear to be working for ‘the man.’

However, my working conditions now are much better. I’m working from home on my favourite sort of problems with my four screens. After a 5 step commute from the kitchen table to my office in the morning I work solid until lunchtime. The afternoon starts late after lunch and a play with the kids and is occasionally interrupted by one of my gorgeous children demanding a cuddle. Dinner is at 5pm and since that tends to work out as a 6.5 hour day I often work an odd evening too. Even though it seems like a short day I have found my output is huge. I am really able to totally concentrate and complete tasks in a way I enjoy. I’m much happier and I’m spending much more time with my wife and kids – that’s great!

Back when I was a Part time entrepreneur I constantly dreamed of the day that I went full-time. How much easier it would be when I could work on GridSpy and not have to stop. When looking at schedules of when the next feature would be ready I could wistfully say “well, it will take a long time but only because I can’t work on it full-time.” Although it was true, it was also a very convenient excuse.

Now I have exactly the opposite problem. With complete control of my time comes an equal amount of guilt when progress on GridSpy doesn’t suddenly take off. Since late last year I have been eternally thinking that we are only two months away from a product that is worth selling, and today I would make the same claim. What we do have today is a fantastic product and a handful of very happy clients. Today our Minimum Viable Product is pretty refined. It is focusing all my energies into those two months, or what it takes to get GridSpy out there, I am now struggling with. This has been a surprise for me.

Each week I can choose how much to work – somewhere on the slider from “Instant Cash Today” to “Successful business tomorrow.” It doesn’t help that I love my contracting job. I had better set the slider back to “Successful Business” before we run out of time. To do that requires the ability to say “No.” No to fun contracting tasks, No to quick cash, No to partnerships that require a lot of time on our part, and No to distracting marketing. But how do I break away from ‘the man’ when I actually really enjoy the work (and the cash too.)

Reflecting on what I have written I can see that I need to reduce the contracting work to the point where it pays some bills only, and spend as much time as possible putting GridSpy as a finished product into the marketplace. Well, after this particular contracting task is over that is.

Further reading:

• Part time entrepreneur, Fulltime Employee
• How our devices have evolved

See Also:

• Gridspy Homepage
• Live demo of GridSpy

Part Time Entrepreneur, Full-time Employee

Most startups seem to embrace 60-80 hour weeks, you keep reading about them and begin to believe that this is normal. After 12 hour marathon coding sessions ‘typical entrepreneurs’ walk 10 metres from desk to bed and collapse in their shared accommodations. Living in such lean conditions makes those crucial first months of business far cheaper. This work ethic and minimial living costs maximises the runway before the seed money runs out.

Paul Graham is one of my favourite bloggers, and his essay entitled The Other Road Ahead he paints a clear picture of how lean a start-up can be, stating “You can literally launch your product as three guys sitting in the living room of an apartment, and a server collocated at an ISP. We did.”

No matter how much I’d love to take the lean ramen noodle approach it’s simply not practical for me. I’m a father of two, a husband of one, and an employee. I’ve got a beautiful family with young children, a modest house with a mortgage, and a full-time job to pay the bills. In short, I have a standard existence that I imagine many of my readers share. Living off noodles in a cheap apartment with my co-founders is not the only way that start-ups are built. I’ve taken an alternative route that involves just as much hard graft (harder maybe?) and allows me to remain employed full-time. The food sure is better!

I simply have to fit Gridspy into the gaps between the hours at work outside of the home and the start-up and the time put into fatherhood and being an available partner. It is a compromise position that I have had to maintain for the last year until Gridspy was ready. Along with the mandatory overtime, maintaining a full-time job limits my flexibility. I cannot travel to meet potential clients as easily or pick up the phone to talk to them. It markedly slows down progress. However, without the job there would possibly be no Gridspy, or less so than there is now, as there would be no base to develop from.

Despite my full-time commitments I still consistently work on Gridspy. As I mentioned in Selling the Dream I spend four evenings a week working on Gridspy (3-4 hours each one) plus all of Sunday and manage to make a lot of progress. Sometimes I spend my four hours on a blog entry, sometimes on some firmware or a little bit of Django code. Lately I have been creating the setup process for new users. There is a ton of documentation to do on our website – it all takes so much time.

Since my baseline existence is ‘family-man’ and a full-time job, I have had to pace myself with Gridspy. If I am not careful I will burn myself or my loved ones out (and trust me, we’ve been close at times) so I have to be the tortoise rather than the hare. At least doing a small chunk every night gives me a lot of time to think through technology decisions and plan my development.

Of course Gridspy is all that I want to work on and all that I can think about. This creates constant tension/wishful thinking in wanting to jump in both feet first and get everything up and running now, yesterday! It doesn’t help that this fully dedicated full-time start-up founder is also a widely published expectation.

But there are no savings to live off, and even though the almost three year old in my life would like to live on noodles for a bit, I don’t think I could for long. Being employed isn’t as simple as just turning up to my ‘day job’ and punching keys so I can pay the bills. I want, need, to be a ‘good employee.’ It takes conscious effort to honour my commitment to my employer. I remind myself everyday to focus on the work I do for them and to leave Gridspy at home. I’m sure you can see how after a long day at the office and after the chaos of the early evening with the kids, it can take a while to get down to the business of Gridspy. Sometimes all I want to do is grab a beer and turn on the TV.

I like my job, it has loads of benefits. Not least that I can afford to buy beer and have nice dinners and provide my wife and children with all the comforts of home. I have been given some great introductions to potential business partners through my well connected colleagues. I’ve had a group of fellow engineers to discuss my ideas with and sound out my features. Plus I’ve had lots of free coffee and idle banter around the water cooler to enjoy. The benefits of a stable routine and a reliable injection of cash into our bank account each month are not to be frittered away lightly.

But when it comes to developing my own gig, it is a chicken and egg problem. The sooner I take the leap and go fulltime with Gridspy, the sooner we can complete the features that are preventing us from doing a large scale release. But the moment I take that leap, the clock (and the bank account) starts ticking down. I have an extremely short runway and I worry that I could scuttle this opportunity before it has had a chance to take off.

Reading entrepreneurial blogs such as Paul Graham’s can make you think that you have to go fulltime or give up. I am taking an alternative route. By creating Gridspy part-time I have been able to give it the time and breathing room required to succeed. I’m starting to think that this path is the most courageous since it requires serious commitment to devote all your free time to your startup. In the end, I am sure that my compromises will pay off.

Further reading:

• Selling the Dream, putting Sales before Software
• Introducing the Nexus

I’d love to hear more about what you are all doing in your valuable free time and how it is going.

Thanks Eben for the chance to share this blog entry.