Taking "quit the 9-to-5 and be free" apart with first principles

I've always thought that if I quit my job and built my own thing, I'd probably be free.

A few days ago I tried running that through first principles, to see if it actually held up. It sounds fancy, but it just means ignoring how everyone else does it and asking what the thing really is, and what's the least it needs.

I got stuck on the first question. I'd been assuming the startup would work. Most don't. I know that, but it never crossed my mind when I said the sentence.

The more I looked, the more holes I found. You still have bosses when you run your own thing: customers, and cash flow, and they're harsher than any manager. You don't get more free time either, not early on. And a job isn't automatically a cage. Plenty of people working remotely or freelancing seem pretty free to me.

Then I looked at the word "free" itself. What I want is really a handful of things: choosing my own hours, having enough money, being able to turn things down, nobody telling me what to do, and working on stuff I care about.

I want all of it.

But they come in an order. Without money I can't even say no, and if I can't say no, the rest doesn't really matter. So for me right now the question isn't whether to start a company. It's getting the basics in place first.

Doing the sums

There's one number I'd never worked out: how many months my savings would last. Savings divided by monthly spending.

Say (made-up numbers) someone earns $3,000 a month, spends $1,500, and has $6,000 saved. That's four months. Quitting now would basically be a bet. But they're saving half of what they earn, so in about eight months they'd have a full year covered.

Working that out actually calmed me down. If spending doesn't creep up, time mostly takes care of the money part.

What's actually in the way

Savings let me say no, but they don't get me out from under a boss. For that I need income that doesn't come from an employer. For me that's what I'm building now, ShipKit.

How much something earns is roughly: how many people see it, how many of them buy, and how much each pays, multiplied together.

This bit was a little embarrassing. For the past few weeks I'd been tweaking the site: a new logo, new screenshots, dark mode, SEO. I enjoyed it. But all of that only makes people who find it more likely to buy, and almost nobody was finding it. Zero times anything is zero.

So for a while I'm going to stop touching the site and spend the time getting it in front of people. First paying customer, then we'll see.

The revenue bar on my homepage still says 0 / $100. When it moves, I'll write a follow-up.