The standard founder story starts with a leap. Someone quits the safe job, lives on savings or investment, and dedicates themselves fully to the new thing. It’s the version that gets written about because it makes for a better narrative.
Most Tiny Empires don’t start that way. They start with someone keeping their job, working on something small in the margins of the week, and slowly building it into something that eventually replaces the salary. It’s less dramatic, and it works more often.
I built most of mine this way. Every business I’ve started, including the ones I went on to sell, was started while I was still employed somewhere else. The runway came from payroll, not from savings.
Sponsored by
You shipped the app. Apple owes you money. Why wait 45 days to see it?
Most App Store developers don’t realize their earned revenue sits locked for 30-45 days before Apple pays out. That’s cash you can’t use for ads, features, or tools right when momentum matters most.
AppCap advances up to 85% of your earned App Store revenue within 48 hours after approval. No equity given up, no long-term debt, and no commitment.
Rates start from 0.34% for a 5 day advance.
Unlock your App Store revenue →
Most advice about starting a business focuses on capital, including how much you need, where to find it, and how long it has to last. When you’re building alongside a job, money is rarely the binding constraint. Time is.
A typical week with a full-time job leaves something like 10 hours for a side-project, mostly evenings and weekends, often broken into 30 to 90 minute pockets. Over a year that’s roughly 500 hours, which is enough to build a real business if those hours are spent on the right things.
The mistake people make is trying to do everything that a full-time founder would do, just slower. Building a complex product, running multiple marketing channels, designing elaborate funnels. By month four they’re exhausted, the day job is suffering, and the business has gone nowhere.
The version that works treats limited time as the design constraint, not as something to apologise for.
When you have 10 hours a week, the type of business you choose matters more than almost anything else. Some business models work well in evenings and weekends. Others don’t.
What works:
Digital products that customers can buy and use without you being online. Templates, courses, guides, small tools. Productised services with a clear scope and an async delivery process. Software products that run themselves once built, with support handled by email rather than live chat.
What doesn’t work:
Anything requiring you to be on calls during working hours. Service businesses with same-day turnaround expectations. Marketplaces that need you to manage two sides of supply and demand at once. Anything with a long sales cycle that needs constant nurturing.
The filter to apply is simple. If a customer arrives at 11am on a Tuesday while I’m in a meeting, can the business still serve them? If the answer is yes, it’s a fit. If the answer requires me to step out of work to respond, it isn’t.
The fastest way to find a business that works is to look at the one you’re already in.
Whatever job you have gives you knowledge of an industry, set of tools, processes, and problems that other people would pay to learn from or have solved. The people sitting next to you in the office are potential customers, and so are the people doing your job at other companies, or the people one or two rungs below you in the career ladder who would value your perspective.
This is uncomfortable to act on at first. It feels close to the day job in a way that seems risky. But proximity is the advantage. You already understand the customer because you are one. You already speak the language. You already have credibility.
Most of the people I know who’ve built successful Tiny Empires alongside a job started with something connected to that job. A consultant who built a Notion template for other consultants. A finance professional who built a cashflow tool for small agencies. A teacher who built a course for other teachers in the same subject. The job paid the bills and provided the market research at the same time.
The line worth respecting is using your employer’s actual work, code, or clients in the side-project. Building something for the same kind of customer your employer serves is normal. Building something using your employer’s IP isn’t.
The biggest trap with limited time is spending months building something nobody wants. With 500 hours a year, six months of building before showing anyone is most of the budget gone.
The way to avoid this is to sell first. Talk to people about the problem you’re planning to solve. Describe what you’re going to build. Ask if they’d pay for it. The people who say yes go on a list. When you have five to ten people on that list, you have permission to start building.
This works better when you’re employed than when you’re not. There’s no desperation in the conversation. You’re not trying to convert someone to keep yourself afloat. You’re genuinely asking whether the thing is worth building. People can tell the difference, and they’re more honest in response.
The added benefit is that by the time you’ve built version one, you have customers waiting. The first revenue arrives the same week the product launches, rather than three months later when marketing finally starts working.
The £10k or whatever budget you have isn’t really for the business in the abstract. Its job is to buy back hours.
The highest-leverage place to spend in the early months is on tools that compress how long it takes to ship something. AI for writing and coding. No-code platforms that handle payments, hosting and delivery. A decent design template rather than a custom build. £1k spent here can save 100 hours, which is two months of evening work.
Later in the year, the leverage moves to people. A contractor who can write SEO articles from briefs you draft in 20 minutes. A virtual assistant who handles customer support outside your working hours. An editor for video content if that’s your channel.
The aim is to keep the work you personally do down to the parts that genuinely require you. The parts that don’t get delegated or automated. Almost everything else gets delegated or automated as soon as the revenue justifies it.
The thing nobody mentions about building while employed is how much it protects you from making bad decisions.
You can’t build for nine months without selling, because there isn’t time. You can’t pivot every six weeks because you saw something shiny on Twitter, because you don’t have the hours to start over. You can’t price desperately low to close a deal, because the deal isn’t paying your rent. The decisions that wreck a lot of full-time founders, the ones made out of fear or impatience, are mostly unavailable to you.
The day job removes options that look like progress and rarely are.
The question of when to quit is the one most people get wrong in both directions. Some leave too early, before the business can support them, and end up making panicked decisions that kill it. Others leave too late, holding on to a salary long after the side-project is genuinely ready to be the main thing.
The threshold I’d suggest is when the side-project has been making at least your monthly cost of living for six consecutive months, with the work fitting inside the 10 hours a week you’ve been giving it. At that point you have evidence the business model works, evidence the revenue is durable rather than a single lucky month, and a clear runway extension waiting in the form of all the hours the day job currently consumes.
Most people don’t reach that threshold in twelve months. Eighteen to twenty-four is more common, and that’s fine. The point of building this way isn’t speed. It’s doing it without the risk that breaks you if it doesn’t work.
If you’re building alongside a job right now, what’s the part that’s working and what’s the part that’s stuck? I’d be interested to hear where people are running into the wall.
Depending on your goals, there are 2 ways we can work together:
JOIN PRO MEMBERSHIP Learn more
Get full access to all our resources with Pro Membership for a one-time payment of $149.
💰$50k in Perks: Access Exclusive offers from the top no-code tools who have partnered with us. Including $15k waived Stripe fees, $500 Bubble credit + $1000 Coda credit View all
💻 No-Code Operating System: Advanced Notion template that replaces all your productivity tools. Everything you need to launch and manage your business from one page. Learn more
🎓 Course: Tiny Empires Method: Learn how to build a 6-figure business that works around your life and not the other way around. Learn proven frameworks to stop wasting time and start making money. Learn more
🎓 Course: Sales for Introverts (and people who don’t like selling): Learn how to sell in a way that fits your personality and delivers consistent, reliable revenue for your busines. Learn more
🛠️ 75+ Curated No-Code Courses and Resources: We’ve curated 2000 no-code videos into 75+ easy to navigate courses. Save yourself hours of watching Youtube videos that don’t move your knowledge forward. View all
SPONSOR THIS NEWSLETTER Learn more
Want to get in front of 34k+ other founders and makers building business faster using no-code and AI tools.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.