How do you start a business besides havin a fulltime job?

You can do it! It's hard, but it's totally achievable. I've learned a few tricks, but I'll share the ones related to my energy levels:

Wake up earlier. I wake up at 6am, make coffee, then work on my project for an hour. That gives me a full hour when I'm at my peak mental capacity.

Learn to focus. This is critical, with limited time and energy, you have to squeeze the every single minute of productivity. I use a tool to cut distractions, playing background music that helps me concentrate, etc.

And finally, when my energy is low after work, I do a session of intense exercise (I usually get on my bike for 1h). Seems counter-intuitive, but the reality is that afterwards your body will get an extra burst of energy that will allow you get going for a little longer.

Then I put another 1 or 2h.

End of day. I end working on it around 2 - 3h. Add a few more hours on the weekends and you get a good balance, while keeping your job :)

1. Set reasonable goals for the business. In my case I'm completely ignoring design and focusing more on core features.

2. Invest in CI/CD tools to make sure that even if you only have 10min to fix a bug or add a feature, it can be deployed immediately with no manual involvement from you.

3. Monitoring. If I'm only working a few hours here and there, its difficult to keep track on when things are failing. Notifications and monitoring is crucial.

4. Outsourcing. Focus your time on what you can do efficiently and outsource other things. For example, I outsourced collection and transformation of geospatial data since it is not my expertise and I don't know the tooling. I'll probably do the same with design when I get to that point.

One Simple Trick: Ride the Rollercoaster of Energies.

Starting a Business requires vastly different energies across different domains of expertise. Our energy will mutated, change, morph, all on it's own throughout the day. Learn not how to manage your energy, or muscle up the grit to get through the day. Learn how to identify your energy, the energy needed to do a task and match them together.

You probably don't know everything. You will have to sit down and learn something at some point. That's a far different energy than creating marketing materials. Excited to talk to customers? Make some ads. write some blogs. Bereft of thought? Sit down and Learn.

Learning and Creating are far different than optimizing Facebook Campaigns. It's like a puzzle you have to figure out. You have all the pieces but you need to imagine them together, or just work through the problem with your hands until your brain sees the pattern forming. Similar energy to coding.

Here's what I would do if I had little time to focus on different tasks:

1. Write down every task. You can accomplish this by writing tasks you do all the time first. Keep in mind you can write tasks that you do every time you work, and recurring tasks, and one off tasks. It's not really a To-Do list but rather all that can be done.

Coding is not a single task. Coding includes: "Debugging", "Coding New Feature", "integrating an API", "Learning an API", etc.

Writing is not a single task. Writing includes: "Copywriting Landing Page", "Editing Content marketing", "Fill Twitter schedule", "Write tutorial for Blog", etc.

Optimizing includes "Increasing Conversions", and "refactoring code" and promotional tasks.

List all the tasks you can think of in 10 minutes. That's it. Everything else you'll just add later or you just don't do much of.

2. Tag them with the type of energy it takes to accomplish that.

Write energies next to the tasks. Examples: "Happy", "Bored", "Focused", "Excited", "Sad", "Curious", "Joy", "Disgust", "Contempt"

54 Emotions to pick from

"Contempt" might be triggered if you see a potential customer and you know you can do better.. that energy might spur you on to code a new feature. or write a Us vs Them content marketing blog post. Put "Contempt" next to both of those tasks.

3. Now your mission, each time you sit down to work, is to identify what you're feeling at the moment. Instead of looking through an infinite to do list, you're filtering down to the exact task your energy is matched for.

If you're Paying Bills, feel "bitter", turn your attention that day to content marketing to get more customers from competitors. or "integrate stripe" coding task.

Now about Tired. Being Tired. Feeling Tired.
Find something, anything, that you're really really really good at and that brings you joy. Manufactures joy inside you. And do that every single day. Don't find a way to that task. Make a way to do it.

I personally get frustrated when something doesn't work as intended, while I am learning to code. I read read read, watch watch watch, but can't find the solution to unblock me. My solution: I write. I write some tweets. I write a blog post. I write a story. I write answers to questions. I write something - anything.

I think a key piece of those stories that is missing is how demanding and hour intensive the full time job is.

I can work on side projects because I only put in 8 hours a day into my full time job. But I wouldn't be able to do that if I had to put in 10 hours. I wouldn't have the energy, motivation, or free time to do so.

Of course, you can always cut out your "wasted" time, whether that's social media, TV, movies, video games, nightlife, etc. Easier said than done, though.

There's already some great comments on energy management (wake up early, exercise, etc.), but I'll add that outsourcing is huge for getting to market quickly with fewer daily hours.

That doesn't necessarily mean hiring freelancers, but something as simple as using pre-built UI components, third-party service providers, or no-code solutions (anything that you don't have to build yourself) will mean fewer outside-of-work hours needed to launch your product.

I'd like to repeat something that @Gillian said. It's very important to find something that you're passionate about that way you actually want to work on it. I started the project that I'm working on now as a learning experience and technical challenge a few months ago and I just launched it yesterday. The point is that most developers do spend some amount of time making sure that their skills are up to date, and what better way to brush up on different subjects than by creating something.

It's not easy and it would depend on your situation at work and at home.

-It's important to switch off after a long day at work for your mental health so weekends are usually your best bet. There is a lot you can achieve in 2 days.
-Try to find a partner, it's like running (easier when you are two, keep each other motivated).
-Also, it sounds cheesy but finding a project you are passionate about that doesn't feel like work would help.

Good luck!

Folks find the energy to watch TV, play video games, hangout, etc, etc. Do you come back home from work and just sleep? If not, you can do it. You must conjure up the energy, it's not about tiredness but motivation. Most of the labor is not physical labor but mental. Most of us are just sitting down staring at a screen and hitting a few keys without moving our arms much. That's the work, sit down, move your fingers. So are you really tired? If it's not physical then you must agree that you're not tired.

How you frame things and approach things shape your reality. It's tough, but if you believe then you must press on, 1 minute at a time and hope it rolls into something big.