My father and brother's houses 6+ miles apart. Were destroyed by the same tornado in 2010. Neither had any insurance issues at all (fortunately, didn't happen for everyone).
Tornadoes while scary don't typically cause enormous areas of disaster on the scale of a major earthquake or hurricane. Flooding causes more issues as well.
Make the leap when you have customers for your new AR software.
Financial stress while doing startups is very distracting and possibly deadly to the new company. Plus your income can help fund expected and unexpected expenditures.
I've done 8 startups, only one from my savings. I'm on #8 right now with a job and slowly building it on the side. It's 12-16 hour days sometimes but I have health insurance covered, paid time off/holidays, and significantly more revenue than I need with dual incomes.
I'm leaving once there's enough capital in the company to cover myself and my partner's payments for 1 year with no income and our first 5 clients.
If you feel you're not giving your customers the service they need, you can setup a small coloc office and hire a 15-20/hr employee to man the phones give customer support.
Good luck. I worked on AR products in Oil & Gas, some of the worst crap I've ever seen in my life. A good workflow will make your users love your product, so eat your own dogfood :-)
Thanks a bunch for the response, great advice. We are slowing but surely getting to the point where we can begin building enough income to leave but you are right. It is just hard sometimes as it can be very distracting when all you want to do is code your own stuff. No one said it would be easy so onward we must go, haha.
Believe me, capital is the biggest issue I've run into in all my startups. You can never have too much.
The groundwork your laying now will help determine whether you're successful down the road.
Read The E-Myth on how to run a successful business. It's a bit silly in its writing but the point of the book is really helpful and eye opening in my opinion. I've got my startup partner reading it now. He's 100% the "technician". It's only 280 pages so maybe a 2 day read max.
The best sales book I've ever read is 10 Steps to Sales Success by Tim Breithaupt. I think it's out of print but you can get a used copy cheapo.
Running a business is a hell of a lot more than just coding, the sooner you recognize that the better your chances to succeed.
One thing I think people discount about this is the subconscious cost/benefit analysis. When something is an interesting puzzle to solve, the benefit is really high and the cost of a POC version is really low. Once it comes time to turn that POC into a workable product the cost/benefit changes. It loses all the value it had for being interesting and the cost shoots way up. It's easier to not have this problem when the lost value is replaced by money.
they tend to get de-funded, weeded out (and sometimes worse, though i hear such methods as permanent exile, public stockades, stoning and crucifixion are not allowed in Palo Alto at this time.)
If you live near any urban area in the Bible Belt, it is more common than you think. Granted, if you're in a small town or rural area, you're absolutely right.
My father and brother's houses 6+ miles apart. Were destroyed by the same tornado in 2010. Neither had any insurance issues at all (fortunately, didn't happen for everyone).
Tornadoes while scary don't typically cause enormous areas of disaster on the scale of a major earthquake or hurricane. Flooding causes more issues as well.