Data shows founders who keep a day job are a third less likely to fail. Here is the exact playbook for building on someone else’s dime.
EXPERT OPINION BY NICOLE RAMIREZ, FOUNDER, NR DIGITAL CONSULTING
Hannah Zhang. Illustration: Inc; Photo: Adobe Stock, Courtesy subject
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The best time to build a business of your own is while you’re working and someone else is paying your salary.
Hannah Zhang spent two years doing it. Her career spans from real estate investment banking in Hong Kong to leading product roles and business school to marketing at a B2B data startup in New York. Alongside the full-time work, she built a creator business on nonlinear careers, writing on LinkedIn and making video for Instagram and TikTok.
“Building [a business] while employed just doesn’t get enough airtime,” Zhang told me. “That’s actually how the majority of incredible founders get started.”
The research backs her up. Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng, then at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, compared founders who kept a day job while starting a business with founders who quit first. Their study in the Academy of Management Journal found the first group was about a third less likely to fail.
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I built this way too. After Forbes laid me off in 2024, I took a job at an agency and grew my consulting practice while I worked there. Every part of Zhang’s approach is something an employee can start this month.
A regular salary pays for your business experiments.
Working full-time “gives you both the stability as well as the capital to be able to fund whatever you’re doing next,” Zhang says. With rent covered, the new thing can stay small while you test it. An offer that misses costs you time, but not a steady income.
Zhang also credits AI, which lets one person produce what used to take a team. A business run on evenings is far more realistic than it used to be.