What to do when making a leap from side project to startup?

“Should I work on my pet project full-time?” For many, making the leap can be terrifying. On Ask ACE, a Q&A platform on entrepreneurship, we get plenty questions relating to the initial phases of starting up, and how to go about it. Here’s a multi-part question along with a number of insightful responses addressing different angles:

I’m a software engineer currently bootstrapping a software project (opentraits.com). I’m the sole founder and owner. Not that I wanted this, but the project simply evolved from other projects and I started coding it passionately. Two months later the project has a demo and the feedback is positive. Technically, things are brilliant, but there’s little time left to spend on the business side. I can’t afford the staff yet.

I have a few questions:

What do you think is the best move for me? Should I go looking for people willing to join the startup for equity? Where do I start looking for people on the business side and how do I evaluate them (considering I’m experienced mostly on the technical side)? How should I negotiate?

Or should I go directly for Angel Investments and hire staff? Is it true that most Angel Investors will not consider startups with sole founders? What is the startup size when this changes? Is it common to find Angel Investors that will both invest money and work at least part time on a startup? How can I find these people?

Answers:

Jeffrey Paine, co-founder of Golden Gate Ventures and Founder Institute Singapore:

First of all, you should make sure that your venture is something that is viable and whether or not this is a project or a company. You should do everything you can yourself to get the product to a certain level before thinking about bringing anyone on full-time. From your website, it is unclear to me what you do nor your value proposition, the target market seems to be developers like yourselves hence you can be the one doing the business development and getting more feedback. If you do not have any kind of a product market fit, do not get other people involved, it is a waste of everyone’s time.

Derek Sivers, founder of CDBaby:

Because your project is “built by developers for developers”, I think you need to take the business role for a while. Your target market will appreciate talking with a fellow developer, instead of some slick sales guy. Doing it yourself for a while will help you answer those other questions about how to find another business-role person. Because once you’ve done it for 3-12 months, you’ll know what’s needed for someone to do it even better than you.

But for now, there’s nobody better than you for this role. People will appreciate being able to talk with the developer that wrote the software. That’s something they can’t do with a big company. And it’s so much more effective, business-wise, too.

What does this mean for you? Just that you spend even 90 minutes a day on the business side. That’s all it should take to make things happen. Put aside 90 minutes near the beginning of the day to send some emails, make some calls, and talk to some people. Then dive back into coding.

When the business is finally too much for you to handle – when it’s taking over 6 hours a day and therefore earning good money – then you can hire an assistant and teach them how to handle almost everything you’re doing. By then you’ll know how to find a good person. It’ll probably be one of your biggest fans.

No need to take on investors. Just take your time and let it grow naturally, keeping 100% of the equity for yourself, so you can stay true to whatever you want to do with it.