Haven’t started a company myself, but I’ve worked with a few people who have.

The common theme is that you need to involve potential clients early. Understand their wants and needs. What you learn from the first interactions will likely surprise you, and greatly reshape your product vision.

Don’t build a product in isolation for two years. That’s a sure way to make something no one wants to pay for.

If you need X months to build this product out so you can sell it, and after that Y months to become profitable so you can support yourself, you need to work out what your expenses are going to be for those months in total, and collect that much money. If nobody is going to invest it in your project (and if they did, I wouldn’t recommend taking it, because professional investors are the natural foe of the entrepreneur), you need to come up with that money yourself, which means you need to save it. Basically, you need to plan to retire for a few months.

You need to look at the money you make and your expenses again, and you need the difference to be enough so that you can save up for the project in a reasonable amount of time.

If that math doesn’t work, you need to change those numbers: the expenses need to be lower, or the amount you get paid needs to be higher. If you’re a programmer with a lot of experience, you should be being paid noticeably more than twice what a human needs to survive, so saving up for N months of eating pasta in a studio apartment in the middle of nowhere doing your project should only take 2*N. months of eating pasta in a studio apartment in the middle of nowhere doing your job. If you’re not making that much, your current job is underpaying you, so try unionizing, demanding a raise, or finding a new job to work at a bit before starting your project full-time.

You can also look at options like grants (which are usually available for open-source work, but which might be able to help you end up with some sort of FOSS-based consulting outfit or open-core ecosystem), or going to grad school and turning your project into a research/thesis project done in collaboration with an advisor, or convincing your employer to let you work part-time so you can put in more hours on your project without needing to plan to have zero income.

But, as other commenters have noted, building out the MVP is not really determinative of whether your business plan will actually work. So whatever you do, you will want to make sure you don’t have no plan for if the sales don’t start rolling in at month X+Y as you’d hoped, and you want to make sure you give enough attention to the business development and sales work that is probably actually most of the problem.

I’m considered an expert in my field, and with almost 20 years experience I tried what you are suggesting.

The thing all us tech geeks forget about when starting a business, is all the stuff that actually goes into the running a business part of it.

You want to focus on the work, but there are bills, invoices, client and project management, etc.

I had clients, I had projects, but I didn’t have nearly enough time in the day to handle all of it.

Then clients started paying late, causing all kinds of fees to stack up. So even when I had time to do the work, I was distracted and nothing got done the way I wanted.

I tried hiring an admin, but it was too little too late. In the end I went back to being the in house guy at a large company, where I get to focus on the stuff I am good at and enjoy.

I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m saying be very very aware about all the other elements before going off on your own.

I understand that starting your own business is hard

It’s worse than that, starting your own business is sales.

Are you working in some niche field where you have a good idea of who your customer base is already? Do you know 5 people right now who would buy your product today? Why would they buy from you vs. an established software company that also has a customer support team? Do you look forward to working with these customers to integrate your software into their existing workflow? Do you look forward to auditing your software for cybersecurity compliance?

You need to be able to answer these questions. It doesn’t matter how good a programmer you are or how complex your software product is, what matters is what makes buying from your company better than another.

Literally the only thing that matters is sales. Sales people make money regardless of whether the product is good or sometimes regardless of it even exists.

Programmers think the game is to make something good. It’s not. It’s telling people to pay you.

Spend all of your time talking to people about what problems they have and then ask them which problems cost them money or whether they would spend money to solve a problem.

Most of the time, if you tell people your idea, they will lie to you about the idea being good, but they will never spend money on it. So don’t try to find the idea that people like. Find the problem that costs people money.

And that’s how you make a business

It’s not just hard to start your own business nowadays but nigh impossible.

You have three options:

• the easiest, contractor way. You basically employ people, then “rent” them out to third parties as workforce with domain specific knowledge. This usually only works if/when a company lays off a big chunk of their workforce, in an attempt to cut costs by offloading the work to a similar company in a much cheaper country (e.g. India, Philippines). Since such ventures have an astonishing failure ratio within 6-12 months, the old employees can bank on the company crawling back for their knowledge etc., and as contractors can ask for a much higher fee. But I don’t think this will be relevant for you.
• the easier, “software house” way. You get the engineers, designers, team managers etc., employ them, and take on contract work where you supply the entire pipeline from building requirements to delivering software and testing and maintaining it. This can be either super fun or super soul crushing, depending on the client and the project. But for this you better have at least one client lined up OR a superb marketing-sales guy who can get clients quick.
• the hardest is when you roll your own product. It’s not enough to have a good idea anymore, even though venture capitalists would want you to believe that fairy tale. No, you need a solid plan going in, viability studies etc. on hand, to even start working on an idea - because that software has no buyer at that moment. You need your own design and marketing team, sales, as well as the engineering AND a clear idea of what you’re going to make. B2C, you’ll need massive investments to get off the ground as each client will provide minimal revenue and you’ll need to bank on large numbers of them. B2B is easier to manage but is a much harder sell most of the time, especially on the volume you need to keep things afloat.

Since you’re leaning towards option 3… as I said you need to see if your project is even viable. If it’s truly a novel solution for a problem, not just A solution but something people will want to pick over competitors. Then you need a proper business plan, on how you plan not just finishing its various stages, but how you plan on monetising it, when you expect to turn a profit, all supported with professional analyses, calculations, facts, numbers.

Once you have that you need to find investors. Angel investor will be your first stop - people who don’t mind throwing around money that to them is chump change, but to a new business, it’s make or break amount. Their terms are usually pretty lax and they go in with the knowledge that they might lose everything, and most angel investors don’t really want to influence your product too much either. In return their investments are usually pretty small ($10-25k at most), so you’ll need to court a number of them to get that starting seed fund going.

Venture capitalists are a bit different - they can offer BIG money, $200k and upwards, pledge continued support, but they also ask for a lot in return, lots of share options, guaranteed say in the processes, etc., they’re basically your first shareholders. The money might be good but you’re selling off your company, your project, before it even starts out.

There are other kinds of investment rounds too but for those you’ll definitely need a finance guy so they’re not even worth mentioning as any discussion would lead to the conclusion “get a finance guy and ask them”.

Find a partner. It can be a person, it can be a small business that might be interested in selling your software… You need at least one partner

You could try to take out a business loan or keep grinding as a side hustle, but if you don’t know how to build a product (and I don’t mean architecture) you need someone who does

And I say it as someone who has come to that realization the hard way

I’m a senior software engineer and I’ve wanted to do the same for everrrrr. It’s not easy. This is why project owner and engineer are two different titles. I’ve made a ton of progress on an app I’m building over the past half a year or so but at times I feel like I’m completely out of my depth. ChatGPT and other ai tools have helped me bridge a knowledge gap but nowhere enough to call myself an “expert” on running my own business/startup. Anyway if you’re interested shoot me a DM maybe we can help each other out somehow .

Your first decision is if you should change projects or stick with this one. Have you validated the concept? Will people pay for a finished version?

Your next decision is if you should work with others. Either on this project or a different one. Almost any project that you could make a living wage will require scale. Unless you’ve identified a niche product that for whatever reason won’t.

Another option would be to work freelance on other people’s projects. Maybe start a business fixing people’s vibe code. This will get you $$ the fastest IMO but could be hard to fit in your schedule.

Do you really only have 3 hours per week? Obviously I don’t know your full circumstance, but maybe there is time you are not using well? Or maybe you decide to sacrifice time elsewhere (gym, etc) to spend more on your projects.