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I quit my job to fully focus on my startup

For years I’ve been working on my side project SiteGuru, while working full time in my day job. As most indie hackers know, this is fun, but also challenging. Building a successful company requires putting in the hours - more than just a few hours after work.

Spending every spare minute working on your side project can be challenging when you have a wife and two young kids. Never really getting into ‘the zone’ and being able to focus on SiteGuru for more than two hours has always been frustrating.

It’s always been my dream to be a full time entrepreneur. That’s why I took the step. I’ve quit my job, and from now on, I’m working on SiteGuru every day. Super exciting, and a bit scary at the same time

Why do it now?

In recent months, I’ve seen my MRR grow faster, going from $600 in March to $1500 now. Nowhere near where it should be to make a living, but the growth gave me the confidence to take the step.

I’ve always thought that working all by myself from home would be a bit boring. Working from home the pandemic taught me that I can be much more productive working from home. No travel time, no useless meetings, no endless stand-ups. Instead, more time to focus, work when I want, and relax or go for a run when I feel like it.

I never hated my job - I actually quite liked it. But working on my own project has always felt much more fulfilling. Building something people love using always appealed more to me than building slide decks.

But most importantly: why not? I’m 100% sure that if I never try this, I’ll regret it later on. I’m 37 now, if I don’t do this now, I might as well never do it.
Better to try and fail, than not to try at all.

So last week, I handed in my phone and my laptop. I got into the car to drive home, turned on the radio and Freedom by Pharrell was on. Must be a sign.

What’s the plan?

So here I am. For the first time I don’t have a boss, and I’m fully responsible for making this work. Where to start?

I’m one of those people that spends all the time building a product, but forgets to promote it. Even though that’s shifted a bit and I’m now spending more time doing outreach and producing content, I still need to do a lot more of that.

Inspired by Jon Yongfook's story about reaching 10K in MRR with Bannerbear, I plan to spend 50% of the time building and improving the product, and 50% of the time communicating with users and promoting the product. I’m not sure if the week on - week off schedule works for me.

With a relatively mature product that works great for my target audience, now is the time to promote it and grow the number of users and revenue.

Looking forward to building more amazing stuff, and seeing more people use it.

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    Congrats on being corageous enough to quit your job. Just checked out your site and it seems like a cool tool - I'll have to check it out once I've built my website.

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