Some great and inspirational comments here. I hope the original poster realizes that there is simply no wrong/right answer to this question. Everyone is different.
My personal experience, which I would not curse upon my own worst enemy: I am in my late 30's and have a family, mortgage, a mountain of bills, and zero savings. What I did have was the passion, drive, and a incredible knack for shifting debt around via a variety of 0% interest credit card offers.
So in a nutshell I kept my day job, did as much of the grunt work myself (overall architecture, protoypes, server config and setup, performance tuning, etc) and shifted the rest offshore to some developers in Eastern Europe. My typical work week is 70 hours which sounds brutal, but a combination of a 3 hour train commute + a 3G Data Card means I can get a lot of work done instead of watching movies on my ipod. Also, while I can't quite figure out why I haven't flatlined, I still somehow find the time to be a good father and husband, though I barely remember what it was like when I had time to catch up on TV or twitter.
Would I have preferred to go full time? Hell yes. Would it have been easier if I was not bootstrapped and was spending other people's money? Of course. However, all that matters is my service is somewhat established, and while tiny is growing strong. If I can do what I have done in the last 12 months, than anyone can.
My personal experience, which I would not curse upon my own worst enemy: I am in my late 30's and have a family, mortgage, a mountain of bills, and zero savings. What I did have was the passion, drive, and a incredible knack for shifting debt around via a variety of 0% interest credit card offers.
So in a nutshell I kept my day job, did as much of the grunt work myself (overall architecture, protoypes, server config and setup, performance tuning, etc) and shifted the rest offshore to some developers in Eastern Europe. My typical work week is 70 hours which sounds brutal, but a combination of a 3 hour train commute + a 3G Data Card means I can get a lot of work done instead of watching movies on my ipod. Also, while I can't quite figure out why I haven't flatlined, I still somehow find the time to be a good father and husband, though I barely remember what it was like when I had time to catch up on TV or twitter.
Would I have preferred to go full time? Hell yes. Would it have been easier if I was not bootstrapped and was spending other people's money? Of course. However, all that matters is my service is somewhat established, and while tiny is growing strong. If I can do what I have done in the last 12 months, than anyone can.