How to Start a Web Business - Do It on the Side
If you don’t want to quit your day job or can’t because you need cash flow, you can still start a web company by doing it on the side. You might think of your day as two workdays: 8 hours for your day job and 8 hours for your business. That may seem like a lot of hours, but hey, no one said it’d be easy!
You don’t have to work 8 hours on your side business. 37Signals built their first product, Basecamp, by working on it 10 hours a week. 37Signals programmer David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the sexy Ruby on Rails framework, was attending school at the time, had client work, and 10 hours was all he could devote to the side project. The popular bookmarking site, del.icio.us, was built by Joshua Schachter while working at Morgan Stanley. After slowly improving it for 5.5 years (since 2000), it has hundreds of thousands of users and was recently acquired by Yahoo!. The first thing that Jeff Barr, head of Amazon Web Services, does in the morning and the last thing he does before going to bed is work on his side project.
This suggests that you can build your first product by making small improvements everyday. As 37Signals says, with less time, you’ll use your time more wisely. Also, if you work on your product everyday, it’s much easier to keep yourself motivated. So if you’re working on the next big thing, wake up a little earlier and do a little bit at a time.