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💻 Good salary or your own product?

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If you had to choose between:

A. A good salary, stable income, and a regular office job
B. Struggling with income for a while, but having the freedom to work on your own product

Which one would you choose?

Generally, I think most makers try to balance the two - keeping a stable source of income while building their own product, trading some financial security for the ownership and freedom to create something truly theirs.

If you were forced to choose between the two, which one would you choose?

Would you take the risk and go all-in on your own product?

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I think I'd go with B honestly, at least while I've got some kind of fallback. Freedom is worth more to me than comfort, I'd rather struggle for a while than always wonder "what if"

but I also think I would want to keep some stability going while still chasing the product on the side 😅

 Yes, combining both is definitely the more practical choice. But when you’re forced to choose one, it becomes much harder to figure out which direction to take.

At this point, are you working a stable job while building your own product on the side? Or is your main focus already on your product?

 for me it's not a side project; I'm full time on it. I'm CEO of RezunateAI, and RezunateLLM is my main focus (as discussed in previous threads).

That said, I get why the "combine both" question feels harder in theory than practice. When it's genuinely your only focus, you can't hedge, every decision has to be about the product and the company. It's higher risk, but it also forces more clarity than trying to split time ever would.

Is RunEvr your main focus, or are you doing something on the side as well?

 Got it!
RunEvr was born inside the animation studio we’re running, to solve our own production needs.
So at the moment, most of my focus is on RunEvr.
With it, we’ve cut the time spent on production management and coordination by about 50%, which means I can now spend most of my time working on RunEvr itself.

I am in the middle. Now, I cannot afford to stay home and "try" to create things that are not bringing me any income.

So, personally, I would go for a combination.

Once I feel that I am stable with my product and have a solid income that exceeds my regular (current) salary, I would make that bold decision for autonomy.

 Yes, combining is definitely the winner in this situation.
But I’ve started thinking about the “what if” scenario - what if you concentrate entirely on one thing, struggle for a while, and that eventually gives you more than you could achieve by splitting your efforts between two things?

Honestly living somewhere in the middle of this right now, not by some clean decision, more by not stopping.

Two products live under me right now, no salary attached to either. One launched a couple weeks back to basically nobody watching, which was its own kind of lesson. Some weeks the freedom feels real and good. Other weeks it's just staring at flat numbers wondering if a normal job would've been the smarter call.

I don't think I'd go back to A though, if I'm being honest with myself. Not because B feels great every day, it really doesn't. More that I already know exactly what B costs me. I don't know what giving up on it costs yet, and that unknown scares me more than the numbers do.

 Oh, thanks for sharing - those are really interesting thoughts!

We have one single motto in our team: endurance! That’s the whole motto, haha =D

If you don’t give up, everything you start has a chance to succeed. Even if your first attempt doesn’t turn out the way you expected, it’s still a start. You just have to keep going and make it to the finish!