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12 Comments

How many hours have you spent on your startup/project?

Hey everyone, I was wondering how long people are typically spending on their projects. I'm currently looking at the hours I have available outside of my day job, and wanted to know how much time people have spent on their projects.

  1. 4

    My hourly commitments have changed over the years. It used to be I would get home around 5:30 and stay up until 12 or 1 in the morning hacking on things. This was when I was in grad school/single.

    Over time I realized that many of those hours were wasted for two of the following reasons:

    1. As my responsibilities increased outside of the business, very few of those hours were actually productive/"in flow".
    2. I was spending all that time programming instead of validating and doing other things to make sure (to the best of my efforts) that people wanted what I was making.

    So now I generally plan things out in bite sized chunks by the week. Example: "This week I want to get a blog post done and out there, so I have to have the draft done by Wednesday, edited and finalized with graphics by Friday and everything ready to submit by the following Monday" - Having that on my whiteboard and calendar reminders tends to keep me from running astray on things like... well, IndieHackers (I have a set schedule for it generally), Twitter, or toiling away with other shiny objects.

    TLDR: I spend about 3 hours a day max working on my projects, sometimes more on the weekends if I get the itch. Some days all 3 hours are coding away, some days all 3 are marketing/validation/customer engagement. I try to keep it split 60/40 marketing/dev.

    1. 1

      Thanks so much for the reply! Really helpful. I like the bite size approach for your week, makes things fare more attainable.

      Really appreciate the insight! Is this for your product validator or something else? :) Would love to see what you've been working on.

  2. 2

    About 800 over the year since I started in June 2018. I took a few months off work to get the ball rolling. But recently (past 3 months) I've slowed down a lot.

    1. 1

      Quite a lot of hours there! Care to share your project?

      1. 1

        www.tewtin.com. At the moment it's not much more than what you can achieve with zoom + excel. I have 1 tutor using it mainly because she believes in the future vision of it, which is different from what zoom can provide. It increases her monthly income by about $200, as well as increasing the value parents feel they are getting from her. I think it's worth sticking with it.

  3. 2

    I have spent over 2000 hours in the last year on my project. It's hard to say how much I work on it every day. On looser days when nothing happens, I spend less than 6 hours a day, but in the week when we release new versions I work 12-15 hours a day.

    1. 1

      Wow, that's a hell of a lot of hours! What's the project you've been working on?

      1. 1

        pulno.com - it's an SEO audit tool. I also build a database containing all links on the Internet to improve pulno analysis.

  4. 2

    👋Really interesting @soluxos how did you go about logging your hours?

    Time management tool? We feel like rolling that out in our team is overkill so would have to do some serious math to estimate that!

    1. 1

      I didn't haha, I've been working pretty consistently over the past four months at around 1.5~ hours a day. So it's just some simple maths from me, and luckily it's just me.

      Yeah for a team I'd say it'd be a real way to demotivate some members. Unfortunately I think the nicest way is doing some serious maths to spare your team! :)

  5. 2

    I'll kick this off and say that for www.bookerino.com I have spent around 200 hours, a lot of refactoring and changing thing I had already done. That includes design, and development :)

  6. 1

    This is a good question.
    As for me, that depends. What I do is I use a framework when tackling something with our startup and also client works. Basically, I prioritize first on what things to do that would really have an impact on the overall progress of the business.

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