Over the years, I’ve heard mixed opinions about this topic. Some people say keep your job and work on your idea on the side, because you need the income and you never know if your idea is good enough. Others say having a job will prevent you from giving your full attention to your idea, which might be the reason it fails or someone else beats you to it.

And I’ve seen friends who left their jobs pursuing an entrepreneurial dream, only to start looking for another job a few months later, and others who never regretted their decision to quit.

In my case, I quit even before having an idea or a plan. My corporate job was draining my energy, and I knew that quitting was the right thing to do. Not having mortgage or kids definitely made that decision easier, but it took three years and a couple of failed products to start generating revenue from my ideas. In the meantime, I supported myself by consulting for other companies, which gave me the freedom to work when I needed to make money, and to focus on my products full time otherwise.

I am not recommending quitting before having an idea or a plan, but in retrospect, it was the best decision for me.

So when should you keep your full time job?

- If you need a regular income to sustain your current lifestyle, pay your mortgage, put your kids through school, etc…

- If your idea isn’t clear enough, or if it hasn’t been validated or tested with the market.

- If your job is actually giving you the experience you need (business, marketing, design, development,…) to execute on your idea.

- If you have enough time to work on your idea during the evenings and weekends, and you’re seeing good progress and results.

Sometimes having less time to work on your idea may work to your advantage: you’ll be more focused and more productive, and you’ll be wasting less time reading news and attending events. Having less time will force you to use it wisely.

And when should you quit your job to pursue your idea?

- If your job is draining you from the energy you need to work on your idea.

- If you have enough savings, or another source of income, that can support you till you start generating money or secure some funding.

- If you can consult or freelance for other companies to make some money while working on your idea. This is a great option because you’re in control of your own time, and you work only when you need to.

- If you can quickly implement part of your idea that becomes profitable enough to support your work on expanding and improving the product. This is my favorite option because your idea has already been validated, and you no longer need to divide your time between making money and working on the product.

Keynotopia, which was launched in a weekend and became instantly profitable, was literally a bullet point in a large product vision and business plan that I had been working on at the time. I stripped it out and launched it as an individual product, and it’s now helping me bootstrap that larger vision.

At the end, it doesn’t matter whether or not you quit your job. What matters is that you do work on your idea. If you’re passionate enough and you believe in it, you’ll make time either way.

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I recently learned an interesting fact: Most of the fuel in a space shuttle is burnt in the first few minutes of launch, in order to bring the shuttle to enough speed and altitude to escape Earth’s gravity without falling back.

That speed is called escape velocity.

Once the shuttle breaks free, much less fuel is needed to make it to the orbit.

Why is it interesting?

Because starting something feels the same.

A great effort is initially needed to break free from the gravity of our inaction: thinking about the idea, talking about the idea, reading about other people’s ideas, and anything that’s not “working on the idea”.

During that gravity stage, much effort is needed just to get something off the ground. That’s why most people give up on their ideas too early, believing it’s going to always be this hard, and without seeing significant results.

But once we reach escape velocity, less effort is needed to keep pushing up. Our effort is then used to move forward, and to change direction. We have momentum, we’re getting results, and we’re improving them.

And most importantly, we have a new habit: action.

We shouldn’t feel intimidated by the effort it initially takes to launch an idea and get it off the ground, or frustrated from the lack of early results. This is normal.

Our biggest challenge is not failing; it’s starting.

Once we’re moving, and once we’ve reached escape velocity, it gets better.

Or at least, it feels better

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I recently had a very interesting conversation with a friend who recently launched an online business, and it surprised me how our fears are never what they seem to be

It went something like this:

B.: I need your help. I launched my product a few months ago, but I am not getting any sales.

Me: Do you have traffic?

B.: Not much, about 100 visitors a month

Me: Then you need to get more traffic. You probably need at least 100x that amount in your market to start seeing any sales.

B.: And how do I get that many people?

Me: It might take a while, but find out people who would love to have your product, or who are buying similar products and tell them about it. Start with people you already know, then ask them to spread the word.

B.: I thought about sending a blast email to my contact list telling them about the site, but I am afraid they’d visit it and never buy anything.

Me: Then at least you know that there is something that needs to be fixed or changed. In that case, you contact them and ask them why they didn’t buy and what you can do better for them to buy next time.

B.: hmmmm….

Short silence…

B.: OMG! I just realized that I am not really afraid that my idea would fail, I am afraid that people would think my idea isn’t good enough. I am not afraid of failure, I am afraid of rejection.

That was one of the fastest entrepreneurial epiphanies I’ve witnessed, and it made me reflect on my own fears as well.

Maybe what we’ve always believed to be a fear of failure is really a fear of rejection, which is a much more instinctive and concrete form of fear. Maybe that is the threshold that is keeping too many people from following their ideas: becoming outsiders, and being judged or ignored by others.

The other option is not to follow our ideas, which makes us automatically accepted among the multitude who never followed theirs, and that’s a very comfortable and safe place to be.

Because failing isn’t fun. And being rejected isn’t that fun either.

So how do I deal with it?

I keep some distance from my ideas and products. I love what I am working on, but I don’t identify myself with it. The fact that it fails or succeeds doesn’t make me a failure or success, it just means that I gotta keep improving it, or try something different.

So. What are you *really* afraid of?

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Do you check your email first thing in the morning? Do you answer your phone when it rings? Do you reply every message and tweet you receive?

If so, you might be sacrificing a lot more than just your time and focus; When you do these things, you are playing your role in the selfless game.

It’s a mutual game that we’ve been playing for decades with our families, friends, teachers, managers, and spouses. And the rules are simple: we are expected to answer other people’s requests, and we are greatly rewarded with praise and approval, and with the comfort that others will also do the same for us. Failure to play by the rules might cause others to feel ignored or unappreciated, which may lead them to treat us the same way in the future.

The problem?

When we play the selfless game, we’re sacrificing the long term impact and value of our important work to the short term of other people’s urgent requests. We’re giving up what we want to do to make other people happy. We’re losing our dreams and winning the virtue of self sacrifice.

That’s why my biggest breakthrough happened when I became a bit selfish: when I stopped responding to other people’s urgent requests and started working on what really mattered to me.

And that made all the difference:  I had a lot more time in the day, I was being interrupted less, and I got more accomplished in less time.

In the beginning, I expected many people to get pissed off. After all, my phone was off most of the time, I had my email auto-responders on for weeks at a time, and I said NO to most proposals and requests that come my way.

Surprisingly, people respected my time a lot more when I set up my rules and managed their expectations. They understood that I wasn’t ignoring them, and that I was just working on something important.

I even took selfishness a step further and started creating things that I’d really enjoy using. I created a prototyping toolkit that I really enjoy using, and thousands are buying it. I stopped writing blog posts to get buzz or traffic, and started writing ones that I’d really enjoy reading, and when I did so, more people were reading my blog than ever before!

The biggest gift we can give others is to be selfish and focus on the things that matter to us. Those who love us will forgive us, those who are equally selfish will respect us, and those who may get upset that we’re not always available to them will someday be proud of us.

- "Mr. Roark, we’re along here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."

- "But I don’t think of you"

- The Fountainhead

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The past couple of months have been very interesting. Since launching Keynotopia, I’ve witnessed many serendipitous events that made me believe that the simple act of starting up something without knowing how to finish it ends up attracting those who can help finish it.

This is one of those events:

One of the most frequent requests from Keynotopia customers had been a mobile app to help preview clickable PDF files without accidentally popping up toolbars and breaking the illusion of the prototype (especially during user testing). Obviously, no PDF reader on the iPhone or iPad was ideal for that scenario, and I knew it was time to create a viewer app for Keynotopia.

The problem was that I had no experience with iOS development, and didn’t have the time to learn it and create the apps. I also knew that finding a good iOS developer who wasn’t working on his own app was like finding a needle in a haystack. At that time, I was doing some updates to the templates, and decided I’d revisit the idea after I finish.

Before the updates were done, I received the following email from a customer:

Dear Amir,

Since we last exchanged emails I have created many prototypes using your libraries. Your method has been taken up by many companies after they saw what I can achieve with it in so little time.

The only issue I could see is that there wasn’t any decent PDF reader for the iPhone that did a good job displaying the clickable PDFs I exported from Keynote. They allowed slide-to-slide navigation, had controls that block the view, allow zooming or didn’t even support internal links. Since I wasn’t happy with this situation and being an iPhone developer I could actually do something about it I have created a PDF reader app just for this purpose.

My plan is to release it for the smallest possible price allowed on the App Store and would be happy to share a portion of it with you if you feature the app on your site. If the app has any success, I will have it released for other platforms as well in no time.

Cheers,

Márton

A happy customer (who later became a good friend) saw something that needed to be fixed, fixed it, was offering his solution to other customers, and offering me a share of the profits.

Does it get any better?

Actually it does!

Not only did Márton create and publish the iPhone and iPad apps within a few weeks, he also convinced Adrian, a friend of his, to create the Android version of the app.

In the first month, Keynotopia iOS apps sold over 500 copies at $1.99 and $3.99, just through word of mouth. But most importantly, I’ve received dozens of thank you emails from happy customers who tried the apps and loved them.

Sometimes, putting half the solution out there is an invitation for someone else to come in and help with the other half, and that someone may be one of your customers.

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Photo Credit: Pranav Mistry

Being a good hacker is an invaluable skill. But is being a coder the same as being a hacker? Is it possible that coders are at a creative disadvantage to hackers who don’t know how to code?

Here’s a story that helped me see the difference.

I was recently invited to mentor at Startup Weekend. On Friday night, we gathered to eat pizza, pitch ideas, create teams and discuss launch plans. At the end of the day, everyone was feeling great about what they’d be working on for the rest of the weekend.

I arrived Saturday morning to find people hard at work. Some people stayed overnight to jump start their ideas. That’s the startup spirit!

But I was surprised to see so many teams already writing code! It seemed that the rush to get something up and running by Sunday evening made most teams focus on implementing their first ideas, rather than exploring different ideas and hacking the best ones.

Sounds familiar?

One team stood out because they didn’t have any coders. So they spent their time creating prototypes with PowerPoint, going around the room testing them with other teams, getting feedback, and returning to their table to discuss and refine their ideas. They were the loudest, most animated, most outgoing, and they seemed to be having lots of fun. Most importantly, they were progressing much faster than other teams because they weren’t lost in the details of figuring out how to make something work in Rails or PHP.

On Sunday morning, they had an epiphany that made them abandon all their previous prototypes and go back to the drawing board. I saw them creating a new concept in a matter of hours. Because they didn’t write code, they didn’t feel bad about throwing away previous day’s work (that’s what prototypes are for, anyway). And because they were using PowerPoint to "hack" their concepts, they were able to get new idea done quickly.

On Sunday evening, they didn’t present a working application, but they walked the audience through a great presentation with a click-thru prototype of the final concept. Not only did they present the final idea, but also took the audience through all  the previous ideas and iterations that led to it.

The result? They won first place!

They didn’t win because their idea was significantly better or more functional than other teams’ ideas. There were many great ideas that weekend. But when other teams were focusing their limited time on implementation detail,  that team stayed focused on high level aspects of their ideas, and spent more time hacking it and less time coding.

They weren’t coders, but they were hackers. And that ended up working great for them!

Many founders believe they are at a disadvantage to someone who knows how to write code.  They believe they are not hackers because they are not coders. The truth is they might have a creative advantage because they won’t be jumping into code too soon. Instead, they’ll be forced to "hack" their ideas and test them using high level tools and platforms that will keep them at the level of detail. They’ll be focused on solving user problems, rather than solving implementation problems.

Hacking isn’t just about coding skills. it’s a mindset of getting things done while focusing on what matters the most at each stage, without getting lost in the detail too soon.

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Last year, I played a game that changed my life.

I was taking an improv class, and the instructor gave us a game to play before getting on stage, so that we can turn off our over-rationalizing minds and get into the flow. The game was called Status, and it went like this:

A stack of card was shuffled face down on a table, and each person was asked to choose a card without looking at it. Then the instructor asked us to get on stage, and raise our cards against our foreheads so that they are facing the rest of the group.  Each person was automatically assigned a “status” corresponding to their card. Then the instructor suggested a business situation for us to enact in a way that helps each person guess the number on their forehead correctly. How would we do that? By changing our postures and tone of voice to match our estimated status and how it ranks against the status we see on other people’s forehead. For instance, if I am guessing the card on my head to be a 8, and I meet with a queen, I’d lower my voice and stand in a way that reflect the other person’s status dominance over mine. And if I meet a 5, I’d assume a higher posture and voice and may be give an order or two. If the person suddenly assumed a different posture and voice, it could mean that either she or I have the wrong guess. The goal wasn’t to challenge each other, but to help each other make the right guess.

After playing the game for about 15 minutes, I had guessed that my number was 9. I was a 10.

So what was shocking about that game?

Almost every person correctly guessed  the number on his or her forehead, or was off only by 1! Could this mean that it wasn’t a game we were playing for the first time? Could it be that we’re playing that game over and over every day?

We went to that stage preconditioned to accurately guess how we stack against others based on how they spoke to us and treated us. And that random number that we were holding on our foreheads didn’t just change how we deal with others, it changed how we perceived ourselves when others reacted back to it.

What was equally fascinating was when I decided to go against my guess, and acted as higher status than the other person no matter what their status was. A person who was confident he was an king and went around stage acting like one, started yielding when I consistently used a high posture and tone of voice during the conversation. Another who was a 5 suddenly started taking advantage of the situation when I lowered my voice and avoided eye contact.

This demonstrated that by simply deciding to change my own status and acting accordingly, the other person almost immediately granted me that status and at times, changed their own.

That was ridiculously amazing!

For the following weeks, I started experimenting with this game in real life: I’d go into conversations picking a random number for myself and others, assume my posture and tone to match, and enjoy seeing strangers changing their behavior quite randomly. Sometimes I’d make it more fun by swapping statuses with the other person halfway through the conversation and enjoy seeing many people transform in front of my own eyes.

Posture, eye contact, and tone of voice were my weapons.

But since then, I’ve come to realize that I was having the best social interactions with people of equal status. If that’s not the case, I’d use the status game weapons to "level up" the conversation.

I also don’t accept that my being different makes me worse or better than anyone else. Life diversifies its own portfolio by giving us various roles to play. But we are not the roles we play, and we shouldn’t get our sense of self-worth from them.

Next time you’re in a conversation with a friend or stranger, try imagining that you’re carrying the ace card, act with a matching confidence, imagine everyone else holding the same card, and treat them with the respect that other aces deserve.

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Several people asked why I chose WordPress as a platform to launch Keynotopia. Before answering, I’d like to share a short story:

When I was at Microsoft, I worked with great developers. But one of them stood out: He was extremely productive, his code was clean, well commented, and almost bug-free. One day, I got curious about the tools he was using and dropped by to ask him. To my surprise, I found him using Vi on a three year old laptop. When I asked him why he wasn’t ordering a new machine or using Visual Studio to write code, he smiled answering: "Because this works for me.”

Few years later, I am realizing that my answer for why I used WordPress is the same. It works for me. I know WordPress pretty well, I am comfortable working with its PHP and CSS code, and I am familiar with enough plugins to make it work the way I want it to.

Does that mean that WordPress is the best tool to create ecommerce websites? Yes, and no. It’s the best tool if you already know how to use it, and it’s not if you already know something else that works for you.

Trying to choose the “best” tool or language is another beginner’s syndrome. It is as if having a top of the line MacBook Pro or the latest version of Photoshop will provide a larger safety blanket and prevent failure.

It doesn’t.

In fact, switching to a new tool or programming language when starting a new project can dramatically increase chances of failure because it introduces more unknowns into the process, and eventually delays the journey from idea to a launched product. It’s the best form of “productive procrastination”: doing something that seems to be contributing to the project’s progress, while it actually has very little to do with it.

Professionals seem to know this rule much better than beginners. They learn, sometimes the hard way, that switching and upgrading to the best new thing doesn’t usually translate to better work. I know some bestselling authors who haven’t upgraded their laptops for the past 10 years, and a few amazing cartoonists who still use Flash MX 6 to do their artwork.

As Hugh Macleod puts it: “Fancy tools are just pillars to hide behind”.

So instead of asking: “what’s the best tool or language for a new project”, try asking yourself: “how can I use what I already know to get it done soon”. Even if you end up doing it in a crude way the first time around, it doesn’t matter. The goal is to first get it done, then get it right; To minimize time and friction from idea to execution.

And may be you’ll end up creating a new way use an existing tool and spin off a small profitable business around it.

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When my earlier post on how I launched a profitable product in 3 hours with a $47.50 budget made it to the homepage of hacker news, the most voted comments requested that I’d go through the specifics of how I did the launch and which tools I used.

So this time we’re getting our hands dirty.

How did I end up with this system? After trying so many setups, from coding the whole website in HTML/CSS/PHP to using online WYSISYG website builders, this is the one that gave me best results in a fraction of the time and cost.

I’ve seen startups paying thousands of dollars to have someone create their websites, and spending weeks with freelancers and design agencies when they could have whipped together the whole thing in one weekend.

I am using Keynotopia as an example, which is an eCommerce site, but I’ve used the same setup and tools to launch websites for products and services before. It works for more than 80% of the cases.

This post is pretty hands-on, but I am still assuming you have some basic knowledge of HTML and CSS ( If you don’t, I highly recommend this book – It’s the only one you’ll need to read to become good enough with HTML/CSS).

Why don’t you sell something?

Before launching Keynotopia, I didn’t believe I had something that people would pay money to buy. But I looked around and saw people selling all kind of stuff: stickers, shirts, WordPress themes, icons, eBooks, etc… That gave me some courage to start selling some templates that have been sitting on my hard drive for months. I am so happy I did. Not only is this helping me bootstrap my next product, it’s also helping other designers and developers create their products faster.

I bet that there is something you’ve created, or subcontracted someone to create, that may be useful others. Whether it’s icons, source code, legal agreement, or a method you’ve successful applied for your product or service that you can package in an eBook and sell online. And if you don’t want to do all the marketing yourself, find a marketplace that sells similar items and upload yours.

You can even sell that stock option agreement you paid your lawyer $3,000 to create for you.

Unlike mainstream consumer products, when you sell professional goods/content, you don’t need big traffic numbers to become profitable. Even a thousand visitors a month can provide good revenue to keep you going and expanding. And in my experience, ads won’t even come close to matching that revenue, even with 100x the traffic.

Alright, let’s get started.

First, you need a domain name and hosting space

I know many people who obsess about domain names. I don’t. Here’s my simple criteria for coming up with one: memorable, relevant, short and hard to misspell (I also buy the misspellings later on). I’d also stay away from words missing vowels, alien pet names, and verbs.

For most of my projects, I’ve used 1and1 as a domain provider and host: their domain names costs $5 and the basic hosting package starts at $4/month. In my experience, they’ve been reliable, their customer support is responsive, and their control panel is more usable than others. With the $4/month hosting package I get 10GB of storage, 600 emails addresses and unlimited bandwidth. Not bad for a startup in stealth mode

Install WordPress

I love WordPress: It’s got tens of thousands of themes and plugins that I use to hack almost anything I want. And it’s free! I use the self-hosted version of WordPress available from WordPress.org, and I follow their 5-minute installation guide every time.

Some hosts provide one click WordPress deployment feature, but I don’t recommend it because you’ll need some control over how it is set up and how to customize it.

Add A WordPress Theme

WordPress themes transform a simple blog into almost anything. A theme is simply a collection of PHP, HTML and CSS files that specify how the content from your post and pages will show up and how users can interact with them.

For Keynotopia, I used inFocus theme ($35) from ThemeForest. It’s a flexible portfolio theme with different gallery and page styles, and it’s very well documented. I’ve also used Thesis theme ($87) from DIY themes in the past, and I highly recommended for those who don’t want to mess with the PHP/HTML/CSS of the theme. With Thesis, you can customize layouts, colors and fonts from your WordPress control panel.

I’ve also bought several themes from WooThemes for a couple of projects, and they are worth every dollar: very slick looking and highly customizable themes.

To install your theme, you’ll need to download it to the /wp-content/themes folder of your WordPress installation folder via FTP. I use CyberDuck as my FTP client (FREE), which is available for both Mac and PC.

Once you have the theme set up, customize it with your favorite colors and fonts, or just start adding content, screenshots and videos.

Install WordPress plugins

Unlike themes, which change the way your content displays and behaves, plugins add extra features to the site.

For instance, I use MyPageOrder so that I can customize the order of pages on the top navigation menu, regardless of their publish date. I also use All in one SEO pack, Contact Form 7 (for the contact us page) and Really Simple Captcha (goes with the contact form to prevent spam).

Be conservative with plugins because they can slow down your site sometimes.

Set up a payment system

To process payments, I use both PayPal and Google Checkout to make it easier for people to pay with different options. Both are free and they take a cut from each transaction. If you want to avoid both routes and process credit cards directly, you can use authorize.net or sign up for a merchant account with your bank.

Both take more time.

Set up order fulfillment and delivery

To deliver the [digital] goods after the payment is processed, I use eJunkie ($5) and highly recommend it.It connects with Paypal and Google checkout in minutes and doesn’t take a cut from the sales – I just pay a monthly fee. It also has some good features like discount coupons, affiliate setup, and allows me to list my products in their marketplace to get even more sales.

At this point, you should have added a page or two in your WordPress site about your product, ideally with some screenshots and a video. In eJunkie, every time you add a new product you’ll be provided with a “buy now” link that you can insert in your site. If you have multiple products, you can use the “add to cart” and “view cart” links instead, but for the initial launch, the simple “buy now” link is what I used.

I also know lots of people who don’t want to mess with design programs to create their Buy Now buttons, that’s why I am including a couple of them that I’ve created in Photoshop. Feel free to use and share without permission (they are PNG files with transparent background, so right click and save as…)

Create a product video

I highly recommend adding a video to your site on launch. It’s proven to be a great sales tool for Keynotopia because other blogs and sites embedded it when referring to the product, and it generated traffic back to the site. Here’s the initial video that I created for Keynotopia:

The most effective video is a product walk through with a compelling use case or story. In my case, I showed how I am testing a prototype created with Keynote on the desktop and iPad, without writing code. I kept it short (90 seconds), and posted it on YouTube.

And don’t forget to include a link to your site at the end of the video, and a call to action (buy, subscribe, try, download, etc…)

Don’t worry about sounding professional on the video. As long as you’re delivering a good story about your product, everything else falls into place. When I showed my video to my buddy before posting it, his exact words were “you sound like a squirrel who got run over by a fat kid”. I posted it anyway, it worked!

You can always do a better video later, or hire someone to do it for you once you generate some revenue.

To record my screen and do voice over on the Mac, I use ScreenFlow ($99). PC fans can use CamStudio (Free), which does pretty much the same thing. And if you feel like pulling a Spielberg, you can also use iMovie ($20) to add some music, text and visual effects.

To record a video of the prototype running on the iPad, I used a Kodak Zi8 HD camera ($99) – If you don’t care about having HD quality, you can use your webcam or cell phone camera instead.

Set up a mailing list

I also send out a regular newsletter with Keynotopia updates, feedback requests, and tips and tricks. To do that, I use MailChimp (FREE) because it connects with eJunkie so that anyone who purchases a product is automatically added to the mailing list. Saves me time.

I don’t use fancy campaign templates because they look impersonal and spam-ish. Instead, I use plain text emails, and I write them the same way I write an email to one of my friends.

Did I miss anything? Leave me a comment below and I’ll answer it and update the post.

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