Ask HN: Tips for engineer who wants to seed his own startup

Personally I'm on the side of quitting everything and focusing entirely on your startup. If you don't, you'll find yourself 8 months from now and some other startup will come out with pretty much the same thing you've been working on.

And if you can't quit because of work...take a vacation. 2 weeks of working non-stop should be plenty of time to get most things up and running.

It takes focus .. and longer than you expect .. to get going under a full head of steam.

The real question is what do you want to startup? -- a full scale business with lots of employees or a one man shop?

As others said: Just Do It.

Get started and once you're moving you'll find that momentum takes over. To keep the momentum going, make plans: e.g., plan to work at least 1 hour/day on your startup whether it's coding, marketing, website, etc. Just work on it.

I wouldn't take a vacation to do it unless I was positive I could do most of the work in that time, but you need continuous long term effort, so the sooner you get started, the sooner you can succeed.

I've been doing it for ~2.5 years now. See blog in my profile.

Comments: just do it. All the administrivia is trivia. Don't worry about the competition. Build something. Charge money for it. Get better at marketing it. Make it better. Continue repeating "get better at marketing it" and "make it better".

Optionally, stir in a new project.

Just start working on it, and don't worry too much about tips, etc. It's easy to get paralyzed on doing it the best. The best is the enemy of the good.

Always work on the most important thing. If it's not going to move the needle or if its a tangential/pet feature, recognize it and don't do it now. Your most precious resource is time.