Ask HN: How long did you work on a side project until it was your full time job?
I am curious to know how long were you working on your side project until it was successful enough to become your full time job.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2016 where @jorgemf convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 88 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 35 comments
I'm probably near the higher end of the distribution to this among my Internet buddies: about 4 years. Partly this was due to it truly being a hobby, partly because bingo cards are not the most renumerative thing in the world, and partly because my skill level at the time was rather low.
A more typical number among my SaaS buddies is about 18 months of sustained effort until you hit $10k in MRR, which typically is enough (after expenses) to keep a solo founder in the field indefinitely.
The fastest I've ever seen it done is about ~6 weeks for SaaS. Even shorter for infoproducts, although depending on the dynamics of the business that might be "launch one, get relatively flush with money, buy yourself enough time to launch a second one" until you figure out some not-too-obvious things about how to sell them repeatedly.
A consultant, naturally, can hit day job equivalent levels of revenue virtually immediately after hanging out their shingle (if they've got a client lined up). A fairly common pattern is "Inform day job of intention to quit; immediately go back to working for day job as 1099 during transitionary period; start building pipeline while delivering for Client #1."
https://officesnapshots.com ↗ here -- I'd say it was 5 years of being a hobby before I decided to try to make it into my full-time job. Was a history teacher when I started the site.
Another 2 years or so of temping, miscellaneous web work, and anything else to pay the bills.
It has now been 2 years where the website is truly my full-time work and I'm looking to hire my first employee in the next few months. Pretty excited about that!
Probably unusual, but about 10 weeks. It was a niche market paid iPad app, written and deployed in 6 weeks, and we saw immediate sales so we left off iOS contracting and began working on it full time.
That was a little more than 6 years ago and it has continued to be our full-time project. However we did add versions on most other platforms and a cloud sync service, and I'm not sure that we would've continued to generate good revenue without those additions.
It took me 9 months. In two weeks I'm quoting a day job. I hit $2k MRR (after expenses) and finished contracting. I'm planning to use the runaway money from contracting at the beginning.
For me, the worst thing is siting at the office, doing job for someone else and not being able to care about my project and customers. Doing it full time is a huge relief.
If side project == freelancing, i just had my first (and only) month $1k. This was though Upwork. I negotiated hard and got 75% more than the initial offer. It felt more like negotiating a commodity (my day-job) than a specific skill set. I won't knock Upwork too much though, as I got my first freelancing gig through them without much effort.