Hi Caroline,
My experience with working full-time and doing a startup at the same time
(on more than one occasion) is that it is nearly impossible to make
meaningful progress - especially on your own!
Having said that, you need to get your basic customer development underway
to validate your business model and assumptions, and to make sure that
leaving your job is a wise decision. Ask anyone you can at first - friends,
family, friends-of-friends. Then make time during your workday or weekends
to do other interviews over the phone. I guess you will probably need to
incentivise your target customer to be part of your research somehow even
though they don't get to see you face-to-face.
Some people are able to get their workplace to drop them back to a
part-time (3 or 4 day a week role) so that could be an option.
In this day and age, you may not even need to quit your job as getting a
reasonable amount of a product built using local providers or offshoring is
fairly practical. I am earning a bit of cash through contracting at a rate
fast enough to then pay someone overseas to continue to work on my own
business and still create a buffer for myself for the next few months. Mind
you, it is not without its challenges as you must continually monitor the
progress on a daily basis. The best advice is to get your development team
to email you daily with a status update.
>From an earlier Silicon Beach post, this was recommended in terms of
questions to ask of your dev team:
1. What did I work on today?
2. What were the challenges I encountered?
3. How I overcame those challenges
4. What I am working on tomorrow
http://www.worketc.com/blog/Development/105
Good luck!
Nigel
On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 7:51 AM, Caroline Gordon <
carolinegordon...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyone out there dreaming / doing a startup around a fulltime job. I
> suspect there are a bunch of people on this list in that position ;-)
> Just looking for inspiration, I'm coming to the conclusion that customer
> development is next to impossible. You can play around and build a few
> things but to asking if anyone has truly engaged with customers out of
> regular hours (and around the 'rest' of their lives ;-)
>
> Ideas?
>
> Caroline
>
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--
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amongst
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*Dr Nigel Sheridan-Smith PhD BE*
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