It's tough to overstate the amount of savings you should put aside. I'd say that even if you save for "18" months - there is a lot that can happen that you wouldn't even think to put on your expense plan, both in your personal and business forecasts.
My cofounder and I quit our jobs and had "12" months saved up according to our plan. 9 months in, and no revenue yet, we found ourselves with no runway left, and needed to get contracting jobs on the side. As Jacques mentions, when you take this approach, a lot of your "good time is spoken for".
The strange thing is that this recruiter has already placed other people at this company (according to the hiring manager). Maybe the terms did change, or the quality of those candidates turned out to be sub-par.
I have started working with a corporate recruiter at another firm, and so far it's been a much better experience.
Thanks for this advice. I was thinking about ways to close the loop and get out of this situation without harming future opportunities. This would be a good way to make sure my name stays clear with the hiring manager.
I try to give myself adventures and goals for the morning to at least make it interesting. Some I've tried:
- Figuring out the most efficient way to make an omelet and coffee, in the least amount of time. Since you only get one shot at breakfast, you will have to try again the next day, and eventually build up your craft.
- Outdoor bike rides for both exercise and exploration. I luckily live in Berkeley, so there are plenty of bike-friendly paths and streets, but having the wind in your face, getting exercise, and exploring new areas of your city helps wake my mind up.
- However, the best for me when I was in a corporate job was to set my alarm for 5, have my gym bag and work clothes packed the night before, take the subway to the gym and shower there. I'd eat breakfast when I get to work. Breakfast for a while was granola (carbs), Siggi's yogurt (nice protein boost) and Yerba mate.
It's a shameless plug, but since I'm proud to be a morning person, I'm writing a series of posts called "Morning People Unite" that might help you and others get motivated:
We recently released http://rewordio.us which helps people find alternative domain names by using a thesaurus. We went with this name because it's a bit shorter, but also registered the dot com to make sure wayward souls got back to the URL we wanted.
I like the interface to show additional (whois, etc) information. Have you had folks purchase any domain names through your affiliate links - or has it mostly been used to come with with crazy combinations of words?
Hi Rich,
I've never seen your site before, I have very little free time, and I use it to code more than read the news. Your site isn't bad.. it's not the best I've seen and not the worst either, which is similar to how I'd currently rate ours.
domaintyper.com is one of my new favourites and I was aware of domai.nr but found it too minimalist to be useful to me, and some minor ones you'll get through Google , or DuckDuckGo :).
Actually one of the things I learned on the project was how poorly I'd initally researched the market. There are far more competitors than I thought in this space.
Many are proof of concept or prepend adjectives, some are more advanced. We are trying to be creative and we're coming up with most algorithms and UI concepts from scratch out of necessity as we're not hugely impressed with what we've seen elsewhere.
Yes we have made sales, I won't divulge the number, safe to say, not enough for me to quit my day job but we're moving on much faster than expected. Being an affiliate, as you probably know has it's drawbacks in terms of not being able to track user behaviour once they disappear into the registrar's site.
Name Toolkit doesn't merely attach words to other words randomly, or prepend random words, but if that's how it looked, then we're not doing well enough. We're working to make our search better daily and we hope that will become apparent if you re-visit.
I notice going back through your post that you say it was a weekend project - we've been coding the algorithm for more than six months, and we have an office set up specially for it, and we are old, qualified, workaholics. Maybe we're slow and dumb... but
Take an couple of examples, 'name toolkit' and 'new site'.
You return nothing for nametoolkit, http://nametoolkit.com/suggest?q=name+toolkit&sort=relev.... You return rawposition.com for new site. Hmmmm. Our interface's are almost similar, but our interface is not our product.
I like the way you present the results, but my biggest problem with our site is that we have to only return the top few results for each algorithm, or else we overwhelm the user. We are hoping to approach this by allowing the user to view results by algorithm, and perhaps paginating or adding infinite scroll. For example, our thesaurus has over 100 responses to 'new', and we then filter and rank these by context, using our filtering database that takes a day just to add an index.
We already have twenty hours on the clock for our domain hacks algorithm, and I will be hand-cleaning tables until 2am tonight again.
You should definitely reserve that name! Maybe through our site? :)
I agree with not overwhelming the user. Though I think it depends on how your users are individually inspired to find the right domain name. Looking at competitor sites, some allow you to wade through tons of results, others just show you a couple.
We didn't put a lot into the algorithm, so our results are mostly dependent on the thesaurus we are using. I would guess that providing a good results algorithm is definitely the best way to go. Good luck gents!
One interesting approach is what nxDom.com does under their 'advanced options' section. They allow users to create their own custom algorithm for things they care about.
My cofounder and I quit our jobs and had "12" months saved up according to our plan. 9 months in, and no revenue yet, we found ourselves with no runway left, and needed to get contracting jobs on the side. As Jacques mentions, when you take this approach, a lot of your "good time is spoken for".