"First of all, I negotiated an opportunity to work from home at my full-time job so I wouldn't have to be in the office all day long."
I feel like this is key. I've been an entrepreneur for the first 10 or so years of my professional career and have had multiple businesses that I started out of the first one because I had so much flexibility managing my own time. Due to a number of circumstances I've been working away at a corp office for the last 3 years and only now I realized how hard it is to do anything "on the side" after spending most of the productive hours of the day in your boss' office.
I know, I know, I could bring my personal laptop and take long breaks throughout the day to work on side projects but aside from any moral considerations it's practically really hard to schedule calls, trying to not get noticed, being kicked out of meeting rooms, etc. In my mind, being able to work from home and set your own schedule is such a huge plus to kickstart a side business/project.
That might work if you're building a product but most businesses require active selling, talking to clients, building relationships, etc which are generally done during conventional hours.
This was one of the key factors for sure, however on the very first stage I've worked from office and still had three jobs or so. But this was total nightmare
"Over time I realized that everything I was doing at my job (e.g. writing copy and managing social media acounts) I could also do independently. My co-founder Dmitry agreed "
I believe this was the main factor to be honest; a partner.
Partner played huge role - he was free of working somewhere else and could for eg. schedule meetings with potential clients if I was unavailable. In future we realized that Skype and messengers work pretty good for our customer communication, but without this I doubt our business would survive
Why do you see it as an ad rather than as an educational read? I'm not paying these companies anything to appear on Indie Hackers, nor are they paying me. And nearly every post on the front page of HN represents some company or other.
The stories on IH are generally developers talking about how they came up with their idea, what they do for sales/marketing, how much revenue they're making, what their work schedules are, etc. Makes sense that they appeal to the YC audience!
Be very careful to properly disclose your outside interests when working with startups. One simple email up front can save you a lot of pain and heartache on pay day.
I do so as well, this may affect your growth opportunities, but you could look in the future without everyday fear running out of money and not being able to pay rent or kindergarten.
Seems to make sense that while attempting to start a venture knowing there's a significant risk of failure, one might want to have a separate stable income stream.
Also, the regularity of a current gig can be motivating... instead of having "infinite time" one must use their days more efficiently to get a fresh endeavor off the ground, and in my experience this cultivates a healthy industriousness, if you're into that word.
I feel like this is key. I've been an entrepreneur for the first 10 or so years of my professional career and have had multiple businesses that I started out of the first one because I had so much flexibility managing my own time. Due to a number of circumstances I've been working away at a corp office for the last 3 years and only now I realized how hard it is to do anything "on the side" after spending most of the productive hours of the day in your boss' office.
I know, I know, I could bring my personal laptop and take long breaks throughout the day to work on side projects but aside from any moral considerations it's practically really hard to schedule calls, trying to not get noticed, being kicked out of meeting rooms, etc. In my mind, being able to work from home and set your own schedule is such a huge plus to kickstart a side business/project.