The Day Job Question

After 15 years in adtech I got laid off, and three weeks later I took a senior role at an agency.

Those three weeks in between were great, honestly. I worked on my own stuff full-time, shipped more in twenty-one days than I usually do in two months, and got a real taste of what going all-in would feel like.

By the orthodox indie hacker logic, that pause was the moment to keep going. The photography newsletters generate real revenue, I’ve matched a yearly salary on a side business before, and I’ve been running my own things online for over twenty years.

The math, on paper, was there.

I took the job anyway, and I’m glad I did.

This piece is about why. Not as advice, but as honest accounting from someone who’s run both for years and made the choice deliberately every time.

The version of this question that gets asked on Twitter is loud and one-sided. The version I want to write is quieter, and I think it’s closer to how a lot of people actually live.

The Orthodox Script

The standard indie hacker narrative is escape-from-job.

Quit your job, build your business, never go back. Every newsletter, every Twitter thread, and every podcast in this space treats the day job as a stepping stone to be discarded as soon as the math allows.

The implicit hierarchy goes founder, then freelancer, then employee.

Most people who repeat this script have either quit recently and need to justify it, or never had a job they liked. Their voices dominate the conversation because they’re the ones writing about it.

That doesn’t get retweets, but it’s the actual reality for most builders who are doing well.

I’ve been in this category for a long time, and the reasons I’ve stayed are worth naming because I don’t think I’m unusual. There are a lot of people running profitable businesses alongside jobs who have been told for years that this configuration is somehow incomplete, and I don’t think it is.

The Arithmetic

A successful side business that pays well still doesn’t always replace a senior dev salary, especially once you account for benefits, retirement matching, paid time off, and the dozen other things that don’t show up on an MRR screenshot.

I wrote about MRR being a vanity metric a while back, and the same problem applies to the quit-your-job comparison.

Most people compare “my business makes X” to “my salary is Y.” The actual comparison is “my business makes X” against “my job pays Y plus benefits plus stability plus skill development,” and that gap is rarely as small as the escape narrative suggests.

There’s also a kind of risk reduction worth being direct about.

A solo business has a single point of failure, which is you. A job has a different single point of failure, which is the company. Running both means the failure modes don’t move together, and that uncorrelation is what diversification actually is.

When I got laid off from adtech, the photography business kept running.

The newsletters went out, subscribers kept signing up, products kept selling. The income from that side didn’t replace the lost paycheck, but it cushioned the landing nicely.

If the algorithms shift on the photography side tomorrow, the day job keeps the lights on while I figure out the next move. That’s how risk actually works when you stop pretending the dream version of indie hacking is the only legitimate one.

The Hours

I spend roughly four to six hours a week on DailyPhotoTips and TheDailyPreset combined, plus another eight to ten on various other projects. That’s twelve to sixteen hours weekly across a portfolio that generates real revenue.

A full-time founder running the same portfolio would spend triple that time and probably make less per hour, because most of the marginal time would go to growth experiments, support escalation, and the operational drag that scales with your ambition.

Going full-time doesn’t multiply your output linearly. The first ten hours per product are way more productive than hours twenty through forty.

Low-maintenance businesses are a feature most indie hackers don’t optimize for, and I think that’s a mistake.

My portfolio works because I’ve built it specifically to not need me constantly.

Going full-time on it would mean either adding more products, which I’ve already written about as the wrong move, or trying to grow the existing ones harder, which has diminishing returns once you’ve reached your audience’s natural ceiling.

The version of me that quit the day job to go full indie would have to fill those extra hours with something, and most of those somethings would be marginal at best.

I’ve watched founders take the leap and immediately add three new projects to fill the time.

Six months later they’re stretched thinner than they were when they had a job, working harder for less marginal output, and quietly wondering why the freedom they bought feels worse than the structure they sold.

That’s not a trade I want to make.

The Team

The reason that matters most to me personally is also the one I’m slowest to admit, because admitting it goes against everything indie hacker culture says about freedom and autonomy.

Working alone is romanticized in indie hacker content and the cost of it gets glossed over.

I like working with a team, and I think most people do, even if they’ve been trained not to say it.

• There are things you get from working with a team that you can’t easily replicate solo.
• Other people who actually understand the technical thing you’re working on.
• Conversations that aren’t transactional.
• Being challenged by someone whose judgment you respect.
• Watching another developer solve a problem in a way you wouldn’t have solved it.
• A reason to maintain professional skills outside the narrow stack of your own products.

Solo founders try to manufacture this with masterminds, Discord servers, weekly co-working calls, and Twitter friendships. None of it replaces actually working alongside people on a shared problem with shared stakes.

The masterminds are simulations of the thing. The day job is the thing itself.

You don’t have to like every job to value working with teams either. My current agency role happens to be one I really enjoy, and that’s a meaningful part of why staying feels right.

But even when I’ve had jobs I didn’t love, working with people was still better than working alone for forty hours a week. The structural fact about teams is separate from the specific facts about whatever job you’re in right now.

The indie hacker dream often gets sold as freedom from coworkers. For some people that’s exactly right.

For others, including me, the coworkers are part of why work is worth doing.

The Security Blanket

I want to be direct about one more piece of this that usually gets dressed up as strategy.

Some of the reason I keep a day job is risk tolerance.

I like having a paycheck land every two weeks regardless of whether I shipped a great article that week. I like that DailyPhotoTips could go to zero tomorrow and I wouldn’t have to make hard decisions about my family’s situation in the same month.

I’ve moved internationally three times, which already takes risk tolerance most people don’t have. The day job is the place I choose to be conservative.

None of that is a moral failing.

The indie hacker culture treats risk-tolerance-as-virtue, but risk tolerance is just a personality trait, and most successful long-term builders have it metered correctly across different parts of their life.

The high-risk parts of mine are the international moves and the projects I keep launching. The low-risk part is income.

That balance is actually how most sustainable builders work. They take risks where the upside is asymmetric and they keep the boring parts boring.

The Twitter narrative makes it sound like the only legitimate path is full risk in every dimension at once, and that just isn’t how successful people actually structure their lives.

The Counterfactual

The honest version of this is that maybe if my photography business had ever cleared a million in annual profit, I’d feel differently about all of it. I know that.

The math at that scale changes the calculation.

The opportunity cost of holding a day job becomes real because you’d be leaving meaningful upside on the table by splitting your attention. I haven’t hit that scale, and that itself is information worth sitting with.

The businesses I’ve built are profitable, sustainable, and low-maintenance precisely because I didn’t optimize them for replacing a salary.

A version of me who’d gone full-time on DPT in 2020 would have grown it harder, made it less efficient per hour, and still probably not cleared the day-job equivalent for years. The thing I built fits alongside a job, and trying to force it to replace one would have changed what it is.

The escape narrative assumes the choice is between “stay in a job you hate” and “build something amazing.”

For a lot of people the actual choice is between “stay in a job you like, run a portfolio that fits your life, and have both” and “bet on the upside that the orthodox advice says you should chase.” Most of the time the first one is better, and the version of indie hacking that gets sold on Twitter conveniently leaves that out.

Where I’ve Landed

I’m writing this from the position of someone who’s run both configurations successfully for years.

The day job and the portfolio aren’t a halfway house, a stepping stone, or a sign of insufficient commitment to some imagined dream. They’re a deliberate configuration for the kind of life I actually want.

The standard advice tells you to quit the job.

Sometimes that’s the right answer, especially if you hate your job, if your business is clearly outpacing your salary by a meaningful margin, or if there are operational reasons that staying creates conflicts you can’t work around.

Often it isn’t, and the people for whom it isn’t deserve to read something other than escape narratives written by people three years into their own escape.

If the math works for you and you like your job, keep it. The portfolio runs alongside, the income stays uncorrelated, and the team gives you something the audience can’t.

None of that is failure. For a lot of us, it’s actually the better version.