Full Time employment
Or the problems of writing commodity software
After re-reading some recent questions in On Startups: Startups and full time jobs and Starting with no real industry experience I came to the conclusion that full-life employment are incompatible with part-time startups. If you feel drained at the end of each an everyday after work, there is no energy left for entrepreneur activities, actually for any activity. This is usually the result of the making commodity software.
To avoid it the main ideas mentioned a while ago:
Focus on an idea that will bring immediate revenue, i.e. SaaS or desktop product. I made the mistake of thinking I'll wait until I had a lot of users before I charged for features. I never made it that far, and wound up sinking money into hosting and other costs in the process.
Embrace outsourcing, exchange dollars for time when it is to my advantage. Since I only have a few hours a night I want to maximize that time. This may be something you'll want to ease into after you've validated your idea and are fully committed.
Tap the wisdom of those who have done it. I like Rob Walling's blog and his Micropreneur site. I've also followed companies he's graduated from his company (i.e. BidSketch) that are successful.
My two cent on the matter, from my answer to starting with no experience:
If your regular, full-time job is so demanding that you cannot be quiet in the weekend without having to answer email from the company, endless times you have to stay more than 10 hours at the office, not only it is an unhealthy job but also is a job that won't allow you to create your own company some day.
Were you to start a company little by little, you would need to have a more compartmentalized work, regular hours, no bouncing schedule. Otherwise, you will end with no time for a startup, not even a decent life.
The links to OnStartups are broken since the site is no longer maintained but fortunately the was an Internet’s archive snapshot