In April 2019, I was burned out in my day job and decided to quit to work full-time on my new business and try to get it off the ground. Back then, I was still serving tables and tending bar in between acting gigs/auditions in Los Angeles. I had already built v1 of the software that I was going to literally sell door-to-door. It was called OKDentalPlans, a platform that helps dental offices "productize" their dental services by allowing them sell subscription plans to their patients. Costco for dental offices basically. I resigned, and, for 3 months straight, I tirelessly cold-called all the dental offices in the country, plus I went door-to-door to dental offices in the LA area, wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase and an iPad to demo my product to dentists and office managers, trying to sell my product. Guess what? With all my hard work, cold-calling like a maniac, and running around town like a headless chicken in a dorky suit and iPad in hand, for 3 months in a row, I signed a grand total of 0 customers. Yes, I had completely failed, my product had totally flopped, I burned 3 months' worth of living expenses for nothing, and I had to look for another job by August 2019. I tossed aside OKDentalPlans, and this was when I started looking into another business idea I had on the back-burner: a Twitter automation tool. But this time instead of quitting, I chipped away at it while holding down a day job and building up my savings. A 4-hour coding session before my shift, 2 more hours after, and then 10-hour uninterrupted coding marathons on my off days. They added up fast. And well let's just say that this one went a lot further than OKDentalPlans. Don't quit before you see a clear growth trajectory I know a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs dream of quitting their jobs prematurely to go "all-in" and bet the farm on themselves. I'm not saying it's not good to have self-belief -- I think it's admirable. But unless you have significant cushion (2+ years of runway at the minimum), it's unlikely that you will gain sufficient traction before your money runs out. Hell, you don't need your money to run out or even close to it. At some point, seeing your hard-earned savings get depleted just gets really old, and you lose all will and motivation to stay the path. Sometimes you just can't force traction; everything takes time to compound. You need time to create your products. You need time to build an audience. You need time to figure out your distribution. You need time for your monetization strategies to bear fruit. Financial anxiety = Mental impairment There's a growing body of research that shows that poverty/financial anxiety lowers your IQ by 1 standard deviation. So while you may think that you have full-time focus by quitting your job, you actually don't. The other half of the time you're worrying about running out of money. And that will severely impact your focus, productivity, and judgment when building your business. - So hang in there, stick it out, and don't focus on the negatives of your day job (of which I bet there are plenty). Focus on the positives, think like a businessman (i.e. "I have a stable source of revenue that I can use to bootstrap my business") instead of resenting it, keep chipping away at your business, and eventually the pieces all fall into place, the wheels start turning slowly but surely, and your business starts taking off. That's how winning is done. If you're reading this, I hope you win -- and win bigly -- in 2024.
Happy holidays and happy new year,
Jay | 