My personal experience is this: writing software is easy, building a business is hard. I love writing code, I hate doing A/B testing / funnels, SEO blog posts, drip marketing, calculating LTV/UAC and all that, I'm not good at it + I don't like it.

and I also hate getting delayed results, when I code at my day job, I see results immediately, although it's gradual, it's still a direct feedback to my actions, I put code, I get working software, I do a code review, I get immediate feedback and quickly implement it.

So unless you are ready to do the business side of things (or know someone who is good at it and likes to do it) then doing someone else's dream is probably a good choice. As long as they pay you what you deserve. (how do you know what you deserve? take the highest salary you find for your role in indeed.com or glassdoor / payscale, and ask for it in your current / next job). There is no other way to know.

But if you are OK with delayed gratification, have a LOT of patience, are willing to speak with customers, do sales, experiment, do follow up calls, accept failure again and again and still try to make it work by changing one aspect (AKA pivot). If you are willing to lose some money to gain money later (e.g. pay for some failed ads just to know the click through rate and validate an idea), and if you are OK working your a off with potentially zero gain for a long time, then you should probably start your own business (even if you don't have an idea, find someone who does, or take an existing idea and do it better)

Even doing freelancing can work, all you need is someone (can be you) who can bring customers, and someone (can be you) who can keep those customers happy in a good hourly rate without too many non billable hours.

My advice to my younger self - try it while you can, it's harder for me now with a family to stop it all and start my own thing.

You always can do the side project thing, but don't expect it to become your main income source without either a lot of work or a lot of luck. I had a few side projects some of them made money, but it was a lot of work to maintain.

Look at the successful startups out there, yes there is a lot of execution and technical talent that drives their success, but I say this is not the main reason they are where they are, it falls down to ability to get users to come and ability to get users to stay.

I see those companies fall into one of 2 types - either they have a very high growth curve (the "Viral" / network effect startups) which are statistically very hard to re-create (getting users is REALLY, REALLY, HARD, a single Show HN in the front page + a techcrunch review + good SEO is not enough. You also need people to keep returning to your product, and tell more people about it) these include free products like Facebook, or market places like AirBNB - they need lot's of users to make it work

The other type is startups that sell something (product / service, one time or subscription), in this case you can have revenue from day 1, so I would recommend this route, but it is known to have a very slow ramp up [0]

As popular to say, YMMV... but this is my personal view on this.

[0] http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...