How long did you continue working your day job while working on an MVP?

Back in 2011 myself and a few mates built our startup over 1 year. Mainly on weekends and sometimes after work, it was a long hard slog - but it ultimately got is into a startup accelerator.. which for me back then was one of my big goals.

We all quit our jobs when we got into the accelerator. I was young, and felt that had to be the way. In retrospect one (or two) of us could have continued working part time even at that point. The company slowly fizzled out over the following year. We failed to secure adequate funding, individually ran out of runway, with a splash of co-founder misalignment.

In retrospect we could have done a lot less, and figured all of it out sooner. Not sure if that was a helpful answer :)

One time I created a very simple Node.js hosting service while in between contracts. Got some signups but not a lot. I did continue to operate it for several months while doing other contracts. It's succeeded as far as the goals which were just to have a few paying customers for a system that did not take a lot of research to set up.

In one case, several years ago I started working on a Docker orchestration startup after one job ended and worked only on that startup for about 7-10 months (don't remember). I ended up stopping because by the time my MVP was more-or-less ready, Kubernetes was released and already extremely popular and I would be competing with Google and Amazon. I had an interesting system but it would not have been popular because it did not involve K8s. So when I ran out of savings and had to take a full-time contract I decided not to try to continue on the weekends.

Another time I spent over a year working weekends to build out this thing I called Vintage Simulator which basically embeds emulator screens in a Lua-scriptable 3D environment. I did dream about that becoming a business, but I was not necessarily expecting that. I was however hoping that vintage computer collectors or Lua programmers would be interested. I did not see a significant amount of interest though or any real evidence of serious users besides about two people. I still feel like there is potential if I keep pushing in that direction especially by developing marketing and content, but it's just not something I want to dedicate so much time to anymore.

My current fantasy which is occupying about 3-4 days of the week while I have a part-time contract is about computer vision and (down-the-line) robotics. It's possible I may have some financial crisis if I need to switch to a full-time job and end up abandoning it. But if that happens it's still highly motivating for training myself in machine learning and related fields. We will see. I have registered a company called General Biomimetics and imagine utilizing advanced 3d printing to create very lifelike robots. It is very good motivation. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRyCfDu...

So far I would say the only effort that actually turned into a real business (did not make a significant amount of money, but still made more than expenses) was the very simplistic Node.js hosting thing which I launched within a month of starting to build it out.

Such a competitive market these days, I would suggest committing 100% on your MVP AFTER you find your first few customers and know the market better.

We created our prototype in 5 days during summer vacation while working our day job. I quit my job when we got into the accelerator, the other founder kept working with his day job for about a year until we had an adequate funds.

I think your question frames a negative in a positive light, "committing 100%". A better question could be, "should I give up my income with no knowledge that anyone will be interested in my product?"

Most likely case (if you have savings): you wind up back in the workplace having lead a more interesting life and having spent your savings.

Worst case: like someone I know you are not able to return the salaried position you once had.

Best case: you get on an accelerator programme, get some support/money and your product takes off.

You may like this book;

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Successful-Stra...

I would suggest if in case you have financial backup and have an adequate funds with health insurance, try to go for 100% to your MVP. I'm doing that currently.

It would be hard, exhaustive to switch from day job to your MVP. One of them will definitely suffer. Your mind and body will constantly thinking about your MVP while you will be in your day job.

Multitasking is good but for a shorter time. It shouldn't be considered for long term. Read this article, https://www.verywellmind.com/multitasking-2795003. And lot of research has been done in that domain.

Again, if you don't have adequate funds to run at-least for a year or two, do not leave your day job.

I used 5 weeks to create a simple Shopify app on evening / weekends after my day job working hours. After launching it on Shopify App Store at mid January this year, I got my first paid subscriber after 3 weeks, and now I have around 15 paid subscribers.

I am really glad that I purposely scoped down the feature set while developing it, and only added new feature after a few customers has requested for it.

I now spend 1-2 hours a day doing customer support / bug fixing for the app

Opposite for me. I wish I hadn't quit my day job, I would be farther along in my career if I had stayed. The thing to note is that most startups fail, even after securing some funding and launching.

Also you should think about adequate health insurance, given that it's a pandemic we're in, and unfortunately only companies can provide that unless you want to spend your own money on it.

My MVP is my son now, there's no time after work to do anything but take care of him. Do your dreams now before you have a family.

Until I made as much in my side project as my day job. It was interesting because I simultaneously jumped jobs so I would increase my salary, and now my side project had to match the new salary haha. But it was worth it because I was making 2x my salary for a time.