[FrankLicea]

I co-founded Howdy.com (YC W21) about 3 years ago. It's a platform for building your own dev teams in Latin America; automate vetting, payroll, offices, equipment, etc. We're profitable and just closed a series-A.

Here's the kicker: My co-founder and I both have kids, family, mortgages. Here's how I did it in the years leading up to and during:

- I saved for years with the idea that I was going to use that money for entrepreneurship

- I was upfront with my spouse and kids about the amount of effort, risk and potential rewards; i could point to a successful dev/PM career as evidence that I could succeed

- Keeping the same standard of living was impossible, we had to budget for a new level of comfort

- We had runway timetable in mind to show some progress

- Our business approach had to be profitable from the start

Your business failure rate doesn't need to be 90% if you're flexible about the problem you're pursuing. We chose an idea that allowed us to bring in at least a little money to lengthen our personal runway. Once we had a sustainable business, it was easier to approach investors and pivot slightly to the market dominating, high risk/high reward version of our idea.

Hope this helps! Happy to chat about this with anyone who's interested in doing the same! f at howdy.com