Hi. Thank you very much for your time and feedback. I will check the podcast.

Yes pretty much I'm all over the place. It would be simpler if I had a single goal and be able to sacrifice everything else, but I can't. These personal goals are very important and spending even just 2 years on that would be one of the best investments I could make for myself, so I have been bending over backwards trying to figure out how I can carve out that time, while still being on the path towards having a product business.

> You are worrying too much about big competitors getting you out of business or idea already launched. Unless your product has a very small market, there is always opportunities for new players. Looks at the instant messaging space over the time we have had IRC, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat, Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Slack and there will be a lot more.

You are right. Even more so I shouldn't worry since I'm small and my criteria for success are relatively low and unlike a startup with vc funding I don't have to take over the world to be successful. So even if a large competitor would pop up, there may still be a place for a few million per year niche variant of the idea.

> Start building what you want to build right now. Don't wait.
> Don't think about doing startup in binary terms. Figure out which product you want to build next and try to find whatever time to make progress on it. During this phase if you have to sort out personal things do that. If you need to take a job to support finances do it.

The product I really want to build (the bigger product), I could ship this in 3 years if I completely sacrificed the personal goals, or I could ship it in 5-6 years if I didn't sacrifice. The latter would allow me to also have more runway savings in case things go wrong. I think there are great benefits to the latter path. I would like you said, spend whatever free time left I had on the idea - even if it's only 10h/week - it would keep me invested in the path, so when the time is due to quit the job, I 'm excited to quit the job and work on the business (instead of keeping the job and staying comfortable).
(I know these are long timelines, but the product is very complex to build, I have to work a full-time job for some of that time and I'm still a newbie so I'm moving slow)

> If you get a job, make sure you don't use company hardware to build it. Make sure that there are no clauses which make products developed on your personal time as company property.

For these reasons I'm specifically looking for a job at a small company (not a startup though) - up to 20 people, targeted around one product (which there are plenty of in my niche), this is why I assume it will take me a while to get a job - because they are usually looking for one person at a time. This is also why I had this idea to spend next 6 months building an open source product related to my niche, to have a near certainity I can get hired by one of these companies. I could have instead get the job in a large corp and I think there are high chances I would get it soon, because they hire a lot of people - but I consider it dangerous, because this is the kind of company that is all over the place, any digital product would be considered a competition with them and they would have the resources to bring me down if they wanted to - and from what I have heard, they do have a requirement to sign these kind of ugly IP clauses. While a small company, they don't have either money or inclination to chasing ex-employee over IP completely unrelated to their business he built in his spare time, and are small enough that probably even if they did require clauses, I could negotiate with them to not sign it.

I think my biggest weakpoint may be is I don't know any potential business partners. I have dropped out of university very soon and then I have been freelancing, so I never acquired any contacts I have been working together with. But what could I do? Looking for a partner could take a long time and there are big chances the partnership could go wrong obviously. I'm comfortable working solo and I think I can handle the psychology of it - but I have only one mind and one pair of hands. What would you say about having a co-founder vs. going solo in bootstrapped businesses?

Thanks again for your time.