I started http://www.justunfollow.com as a way to learn Google Appengine. Sent a tip to TechCrunch, @arrington seemed to like it and profiled it. It started making profits but I did not quit. I finally had to quit after about 1 year of this product going live because it started making me more money in 2 months than my day job was paying me for an entire year!
I quit my job around 9 months ago. Finding too much of time on hand I subsequently started work on a new app, got my friend to join me and we got into Start-up Chile. It's been a great journey but I'm so glad that I did not quit the moment we were profitable. It has taught me the most important thing you need to learn while starting up, being efficient.
I always suggest everyone who has a product to not quit until it is virtually impossible to keep up with a day job. You then become a time management champ and know how to do more with less :)
"making me more money in 2 months than my day job was paying me for an entire year!"
Day job of 50k / year, over 2 months, so per month 25k. 'Making money' = profit, otherwise I could be 'making' 250k / month by opening a BMW dealership and selling 2 per month - which in the real world would bankrupt me Very Quickly.
So, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but didn't you say that you were making 25k or more?
I'm from India, we make money in our currency which is Rupees (INR). I do know that 'making money' = profit and that is exactly what we are making. I'm not selling BMW cars. I write code which takes my time but needs no money, host it on GAE and AWS, which is not so expensive and so make a very good profit.
Yes, you are misunderstanding what I said by pushing those figures.
Oh OK, so then you were making in the magnitude of $250 - $500 / month back then, that seems plausible. I wasn't saying that you are selling BMW's, what you sell doesn't matter - my point was that people use 'make money' when they mean 'revenue', so the BMW is my standard example for illustrating the difference.
I'm not sure why I'm being down voted - my numbers are quite plausible, I was just doing a sniff test. It would've been quite remarkable if a simple site like that would've been making several k / month after just 2 months.
I quit my job around 9 months ago. Finding too much of time on hand I subsequently started work on a new app, got my friend to join me and we got into Start-up Chile. It's been a great journey but I'm so glad that I did not quit the moment we were profitable. It has taught me the most important thing you need to learn while starting up, being efficient.
I always suggest everyone who has a product to not quit until it is virtually impossible to keep up with a day job. You then become a time management champ and know how to do more with less :)