What are the chances of one succeeding with moonlighting?

November 16, 2007 at 7:56 am | Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Tags: , moonlighting, startup



Well it depends on situation. Let me tell you some upsides and downsides so you can judge yourself.

I and two of my friends have been working on this Onista Project for a while now.

All 3 of us have full time jobs and we are working on Onista development mostly during evenings and weekends.

It has been challenging and at the same time very interesting journey. During this period we have learned lots of new things and I feel that we are getting quite good at moonlighting.

Let me explain some of the advantages and disadvantages of moonlighting.

Let’s look at some of the downsides of moonlighting first,

There is never enough time to do things. This causes long application development cycle and pretty much delays all of your plans. If you think something will take 4 weeks to launch, I think you can safely multiply that 4 weeks with 3x. That is certainly happening to us.

You are always behind the schedule. This is direct effect of the fact that you do not have enough time to spend on your startup. Fortunately you are defining your own schedules and there is no one to kick your arse if you don’t meet the schedule

People tend to show less interest in your startup because you are working on it on part-time basis. It is a general perception that “They are doing SOMETHING on the side”. No one really takes interest to understand what that SOMETHING is. In a way it protects your idea if you like to hide it

You are overworked and can not spend enough time with family. Yes this is big issue. Imagine working on your day job from 9-7 and then coming home and again working until 3 AM. Weekends are completely taken by startup. Pretty much no time for family. This one is very tricky to handle. God bless you with this one

Your social life does not exist. Simply no time for friends and social activities

Now let’s take a look at some of the upsides,

You can fund your own startup. Actually this is the major reason I personally prefer moonlighting because we do not need to go and ask for money to someone else. In our case we raised much more money “in one day” than what YC invests by ourselves putting money in company. Heck if you are making good money then might as well use that money for your own startup. There is pretty much never ending pool of funds and I love this fact

You tend to utilize your time and energy on important things. Now given that you do not have lot of time, you will get pretty good at focusing on important stuff

You will not hop from one idea to another. Again, since you do not have lot of time to hop on ideas you will take one idea seriously and end up devoting yourself to that one until your users reject your app

There are less fights among founders. There is just no time to fight. Trust me. In our case, we meet like once or twice a week. We assign tasks (to each other) for coming week and then we work from home on those tasks. We mostly communicate over IM, email or phone and none of those are good mediums to fight anyway

If you love coding then you can enjoy it 24/7

Since you are always making money, even if your current startup fails you will still have ongoing funding for your next startup

You do not need to give any equity to anyone for amount like 20k. I mean come on, that is such a small investment to give any equity away. (I am not talking about YC money here because I know that getting money from YC is much more than just money and I really respect Paul for what he has been doing)

You do not actually need any office space or incubator

You get very good at defining requirements and getting those done on rentacoder or elance. There are always those small pieces of work (like repetitive testing) that no one in your team enjoys doing can be simply get done on rentacoder or elance

No one is going to kick you because your took money from them for your FAILED startup. No one even cares if your startup fails

You have freedom to define your rules and game because you did not take money from anyone else

So I think in our situation moonlighting is working pretty well and all of us are adjusted well enough to the situation now. Don’t take me wrong though. We do want to go full-time on this startup as soon as we can, but I think we can manage with moonlighting and we prefer doing it to keep funding our startup ourselves for now. I seriously mean “for now” here because things can change anytime.

I know that there are lots of people out there who have full time jobs and desire to start a startup but can not do so because your family depends on your paycheck. I really suggest moonlighting as an good alternative to those folks who are not fortunate enough to quit jobs and yet have strong passion for startups.

As I listed, there are some disadvantages and yet there are lots of advantages too. So go for it.

Good luck.