March 10, 2010

I just want to CRUSH IT SO HARD.

So being an entrepreneur with a day job didn’t sound hard before I started doing it.

I work full time doing software engineering at a huge company.  I come home and eat dinner with the wife and kids, help bathe them, shape their young and impressionable minds and put them to bed  spend a few minutes doing chores and talking to my wife then get back on the computer and work on my startup.  I write code while chatting with my co-founder until 2am some nights.  Wake up at 6am and repeat.  Throw in coaching a girls soccer team and you have sourself a busy but manageable schedule.  and no sleep but that’s for suckers and dead people anyway.

That was all fine and good while we were mostly in “build a product” phase.  We had no customers to support and we had very little in the way of interest from potential customers but we just knew we were building something people would love and pay us money for.  Then we’d sell it to Google for $1billion and quit our day jobs.

It just ain’t working out that way yet.  Who knew traction was so hard to get?  I’ve been getting tons of phone calls and emails about OtherNumber the past week or so because of being on StartupAtlanta #OnStage, StartupRiot and This Week in Startups. but I haven’t seen any financial uptick yet.  We’ve fielded some incredible inquiries from people all over the country.  I have literally 500 billion ideas for things we could build and make a ton of money on.

But turns out that business development and marketing are hard things to do in a short window between 9pm and 2am every day and on the weekends.  For one thing, the normal business world shuts down around 5pm.

Luckily, I deal mostly with other entrepreneurs and startup-types so they also don’t sleep.  I’ve had phone conversations with people at 11pm about APIs and 9pm about pricing bulk quantities of DIDs in Ohio.  Then of course there are the long chats with my co-founder that go on into the night.

I guess what I’m saying is that everyone who told me to quit my day job was right.  You can’t really do both after a certain point.  If I already had a successfull exit under my belt and could live off my Google stock that I sold for $500 per share then I’d be spending 124 hours a week on OtherNumber. I’m not even joking.  But I can’t do that.  I have a wife and 3 kids and a bank executive to feed.  Oh yeah, and student loans from my MBA.

So I can’t quit my day job.  I need it.  While it’s frequently challenging, it’s not always challenging in a good way and it’s not where I see myself in 5 years*.  I’ve already been there > 12% of my life fixing up the same huge application built by horrible programmer and in the big scheme of things it seems like a waste of time.

So I’ll keep on trucking and do what I can to make the most out of both worlds.  Hey, it worked for Hanna Montana!?

* Boss man: please don’t fire me for saying that.  My kids enjoy eating regular meals.

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