12 Things You Can Do to Advance Your Startup While Maintaining Your Day Job
By: Jonathan Woahn
Tags: Startup Lessons, Life Lessons, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Entrepreneur

Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

12 Things You Can Do to Advance Your Startup While Maintaining Your Day Job

And answering the question “When is the right time to quit”?

The idea for my first business came to me in January of 2014. I was working with my 6th manufacturing client at McKinsey, and realized the fundamental behaviors driving the problem we were there to solve mirrored the previous 5 companies almost to the “t”.

My engineering brain went into overdrive, and I began thinking of what a technology platform would look like that could both address and improve those behaviors.

As the idea took shape in my brain, I pitched it to 2–3 friends at the client and received extremely positive feedback. This feedback was enough that I immediately decided I should pursue the idea full time. I considered those few conversations the full extent of my market research.

I’d never started a business before, but I knew 2 things. First, I knew it was hard, and second, I knew it took all of one's time/attention to pursue. Thus, I began plotting my exit from McKinsey.

Without any declared goals or specific milestones to hit first, I determined at that moment I would leave McKinsey in 12 months. In 1 year, I would quit my job, and go full time — which in my mind, going full time was the only way to legitimately start a business.

I didn’t think there was any way I could keep my day job and make material progress on the business. One year was the minimum amount of time I needed to save enough money to go full time and to develop the idea enough that I knew what I’d be building.

For the next 12 months, I basically focused on filling out a business model canvas. When the declared day of leaving McKinsey finally arrived, I may as well have spent my first day googling “How to start a business”.

One of the many lessons I have learned since was — this is a terrible way to approach starting a business. You don’t have to be a seasoned entrepreneur to see this.

Top 12 ideas you can pursue with a day job

With no coach, no mentor, and nobody really to provide guidance, I had a very myopic view of entrepreneurship.

Now, nearly 7 years later, my hindsight is quite clear. There are literally an endless number of things I easily could have pursued while maintaining a full-time job. This article is for the first time entrepreneur who’s wrestling with this same issue. So that you can learn from my mistakes, here are 12 of my top ideas of things I could have done before leaving my job, but didn’t.

1. Figure out your company name/brand

There is literally no reason I waited to leave my job before figuring this one out, and neither should you. Think of your company narrative, and think of ideas that support it. Share the name with your family, friends and get their thoughts. Google it and see what comes up. Check with the USPTO to see what name competition exists, and how you might want to vary the name you do business under from the name you market. Use Upwork or Fiverr to find a freelancer and design a logo and your color palette.

2. Buy a domain

Real-estate on the web is a crowded place. The most obvious names are all claimed, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still good opportunities. It just takes a lot of time. So start your research now. Use tools like Google domains to check what’s available, or Snapnames, which will be more expensive, but there are great domains available there. Brandbucket can be even more expensive, but you’re also buying a starter kit to jumpstart your brand, which can be helpful if you find something you really like.

3. Create a landing page

Design a landing page to tell your company’s story, and build it using a free/cheap service like Carrd, Mailchimp, or Wix. Create a specific Call to Action (CTA) that will help advance your idea. This could mean having visitors take a short survey and providing feedback or collecting their email addresses. If you’re feeling really ambitious, set up multiple landing pages with slightly different messaging around your value proposition, or perhaps targeting different segments of who you believe your audience to be so you can find which drive the most growth.

4. Test marketing messages/channels

Connect your landing pages to Google Analytics (most of the platforms I mentioned above will have this as a configuration property) so you can start understanding how people are finding your site. Google “free google adwords”, “free facebook ads”, “free linkedin ads” to find options on getting and learning how to use some free ad spend credits. Use it to try and find which terms resonate the most with driving people to your site.

5. Build and curate a mailing list

Use all the emails you’re collecting from your landing page(s) to start a weekly newsletter. Send out relevant information about your product/service. Give updates, progress, or share helpful industry-related information. Use a free service like Mailchimp or Hubspot Marketing to design, send, and track analytics on your emails. Track open rates, see what content people are reading/clicking on. As you’re consistent, people will unsubscribe, and others will keep reading. That’s good, you’re refining your audience and messaging.

6. Interview prospective customers/clients

Use the emails you’re collecting to reach out to contacts and ask if they’d be willing to take a quick phone call. Identify questions you can ask that will test the hypothesis of your business. The goal is to get as clear an understanding of the customer pain as you can — not to get validation on your solution. Once you can understand and articulate the problem, as the saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin that cat.

7. Build our your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Come up with the profile of the type(s) of individuals/companies that will purchase your product/service. If you’re selling to individuals, figure out their gender, age, interests, where they shop, and how they’re solving your identified problem today. If you’re selling to businesses, figure out what industry they’re in, the size of the company, and who within the company you need to be talking to. Write all these things down. You need to iterate on your definition, and continually refine/hone it. The clearer the definition of your customer, the easier it will be for you to find them.

8. Articulate your problem statement/null hypothesis

Building a business is fundamentally a science experiment. Your null hypothesis is a statement of the problem you think you are solving. Everything you do to launch your business should be in the spirit of trying to disprove your null hypothesis, so you can rewrite it and make it stronger/more accurate. At some point, you’ll no longer be able to disprove your hypothesis, and you’ll know you’ve come into truth that resonates with your target market. The better you can articulate this, the easier it will be for you to explain your company’s value proposition.

9. Build a prototype of the product and get feedback

Regardless if you’re building a physical product, software, or delivering a service, there are ways to create simple prototypes to get feedback. Get creative. As you build your mailing list and define your ICP, you have an audience that can provide feedback on your prototype. If you’re building software, this could look like visual designs. You can use Figma, Invision or even Google Slides to visualize the user experience. If you’re providing a service, contact your list and provide it for free to the first 10 respondents. If you’re building a physical product, find people in your local proximity so you can get the prototype in their hands. Test it yourself to solve your own problem. While the medium of your solution may change, getting customer feedback is a critical step that you can do on the side.

10. Identify and prove teammates

Put the time into finding your “who”. While you can go at it alone, it’s much easier/more powerful to have someone(s) at your side. Find them. This is a great time to prove it out. You’re not reliant on each other yet, so find who you can work with, and who will show up to the fight. Work out the details of roles and timing of when you’ll leave your jobs. Make sure you’re all committed and work well together before formalizing any arrangement. Handshake partnerships are a quick way to get started before making anything permanent, as you have to be able to trust each other.

11. Incorporate the company

When the time comes, move to incorporate your company, but don’t make it the first thing you do. You don’t have to wait until you’re full time to incorporate, but you do want to make sure you have the right teammates and are headed in the right direction with your product/service. If you incorporate too early, you’re going to waste a lot of time and money if things don’t work out. But once you’re confident, there’s no reason to wait until your full time, as this step takes much longer than you think.

12. Figure out funding

Work out the financial model for your business, and figure out how much money you’re going to need to become sustainable. Will you be able to self-fund? How far can you get while maintaining your day job? Will you need to fundraise? And if so, what milestones do you need to hit to best position your fundraise? The best thing about working on all these things while you have a day job is you can often make much more progress on your own before seeking funding if you ever need to at all. The worst thing you can do is quit your job and then figure out how you’re going to fund it later (that’s what I did, and I highly discourage doing this).

How to know when to quit your day job and go full time

You might be wondering “These seem like all the things I’d be doing while working full time, so if I do them while I keep my day job, when should I actually leave to pursue it full time?”

The simple answer to this question is — you will know. It might feel like a cop-out, but here’s what will happen.

You’ll have your business fundamentals in place. You have your partner(s) figured out, the domain, brand, website, incorporation is all complete. The least sexy parts of starting a business are all taken care of, and now you’re primarily focused on two things: product and sales.

This generally takes shape in the form of the feedback you’re receiving from prospective customers. There’s so much of it rolling in that the hours you have available are literally limiting your ability to react to it. If customers are providing feedback, it means they care. If you have so much of it you can’t respond, it means you’re gaining an audience. Translate that feedback into your product. Get it back in your customer's hands. Find more customers. Rinse. Repeat.

At some point, your business will feel imminent. You don’t have answers to all the questions, but if you’ve done the items on this list, you will have a solid foundation to start from. Done right, you should have a very clear path to create value for your customers when you step away from your day job. Until then, keep building!