Episode 832 | Going Full-time, When to Pivot, Building With Young Kids, and More Listener Questions (Rob Solo)

**Rob Walling** (0:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Startup for the Rest of Us. I'm your host Rob Walling, and in this episode, I'm going to do a lightning round of listener questions. In fact, I'm going to take as many of the written listener questions, the text questions that we receive, and crank through them with probably shorter than usual answers. The challenge is, we get a lot of questions here at the show, and it's great. It makes for great content. It allows you as a listener to hear other voices, and to hear what folks are working on. And frankly, they may ask questions that you've never thought of. And that can help make us all just a little bit smarter and get there a little bit faster. But I tend to put audio and video questions to the top of the stack. Every now and again, I fudge that rule. But as a result, our text questions, they pile up. And I have some questions here from 2024, from two years ago. So I apologize to those folks, but I kind of wanted to crank through a bunch of the backlog. And there's an awesome range of questions from reducing risk with my startup to go full time, when to register as a business, design audits, how to calculate TAM for a step one business, how to know when to pivot, all kinds of things we're going to get into. But before I dive into that, I'm doing a live Q&A, an AMA on May 20th, and it's only available for Microconf Connect members. Microconf Connect is our online community for founders just like you, folks who are bootstrapping or mostly bootstrapping and building incredible SaaS companies. Microconf Connect is highly curated, and it is one of the higher signal to noise forums or online communities that you can be part of in the space. So go to microconfconnect.com if you want to check it out. And again, I'm doing a live Q&A slash AMA where you get to ask questions and hear me answer them only for members of Connect on May 20th. Sign up before then to get access.
Let me dive into my first question. This one's about reducing risk with my startup to go full time. It's actually a Reddit thread, and we'll of course link that up in the show notes. And a user was sharing their salary information as they went from an intern making $15 an hour in 2017, to a tech company product strategist in 2025 at 28 years old making $440,000 a year. Now, caveat this, they probably have to live in the Bay Area or in a very expensive place in order to make that. So I'm guessing they do not live in a low cost of living city. And one response to this thread said, Congrats man, I have a question for you. I earn $400,000 via my base salary. I work at a Fortune 50 company. I have a side hustle that is the one man army of me and freelancers of course. The salary I pull for the business is good. My thing is, how do I get over that hurdle to go all in on the business? It's not that the salary I draw from it is bad, it's the unknown future factor. W2 is safe. I'm well known within my space, so jumping to another company isn't hard for me. But that fear of the company fizzling out in a few years gets me. I've had successful businesses that ran into scaling issues before and those fizzled out. This one I think has longevity, but no way I can scale it to where it needs to be without cutting the W2.
So what do I need to just do it? Now, I actually think this person thought that the original poster was a founder, and they're not. And so there's a bunch of people in the thread that are like, oh, you know, basically you mistakenly asked this question and there's no good answer to it, which is one of the reasons I wanted to address it on the show.
Building a business when you have a really high salary and taking the jump is very hard. This is why it's easier to basically take this leap when you're younger, because when you're in your teens, twenties, even early thirties sometimes, I guess this 28 year old's making almost half a million dollars, but get the idea, the younger you are, usually your earning potential is lower.
And the further on you get in your career, the harder it gets. So one thing to note is if you're listening to this, you're still early in your career, now is probably the best time to start a business if you want to do this eventually. The other thing is that these high salaries, they are like golden handcuffs. And the only piece of advice I can imagine for someone making $400,000 a year as a W2 employee who wants to take the leap is to save a bunch of that money. If you are spending $390,000 of that and only saving $10,000 a year, then yeah, it's a huge risk. But if you are saving, if you're making $400,000 and you can suck away $200,000 a year, then in a couple years, you have two full years of living expenses. You already have a business that's doing something. You said the salary you pull for the business is good. So you should actually be able to save more than $200,000. You get the idea of what I'm saying. The biggest problem I've seen with folks making as much money as their lifestyle inflation. And they or they and their spouse just live it up and that's great. Unless you want to leave to start your business. That's when it's a problem. So having the discipline and having the optionality of sucking a bunch of money away in the bank, and then guess what? You have a business. If you get to the point where it's not scaling and it fizzles out, then you go back and get that W2 job again. You said you're well known in the industry and it would be easy for you to switch companies. Obviously, that goes down a little bit over the years. If you get 10 years into the business and you try to go back, yeah, there's probably going to be a little bit of a challenge in getting the old job back at that rate. But it feels to me like you have to make that decision of when is it worth it? I remember I was making between $250,000 and $300,000 a year as a consultant. I was a microagency where I was doing a lot of work, but I was outsourcing to freelancers and I was making a big cut on those folks. This is 2007-8-ish time frame.