In the big scheme of things, a person may have several companies but only have one family. The later is of heavier weight.
Some advise if you decide to go in this directiom:
(1) stop bringing up work related frustrations. Ideally, only bring it up once. Discuss it. Close it. As you will be together more often, you may have more oppurtunities to bring up past work frustrations. Don't. Minimize that.
(2) being together more often means you can turn idle time into a business discussion. Leverage that. You can discuss business while stuck in traffic, on a ride home, and so on.
(3) when you two can't agree on a business direction, there are several ways around it. (A) execute two directions separately. See which direction gives better result. Integrate your learnings. Make a new direction. (B) follow the more passionate direction then queue a pivot direction. If the primary direction works out, great. If not, no blame game. Execute the pivot direction fast. Don't get stuck arguing which of you should be followed. It's possible to try two directions at once.
(4) in the far future when a baby comes in, it is highly likely that your significant other will give more attention to the baby than the company. Prepare for this transition.
(1) at least have something to show. The closer you are to having a 100% mvp ready, the more likely you are to get a yes.
(2) have at least one paying customer or at least a list of likely customer prospects. When you get a yes from a cofounder, their runway starts burning away. The farther you are from your first dollar, the more likely that you and your co-founder will break up in the near future.
Realized my salary was not enough to start a family.
Later on realized that if immediate money is what you are after, the startup route is probably a bad match.
These days the ff keeps me going:
(1) desire to solve my own problem - my venture provides a solution to a problem i've encountered in the past.
(2) monetization. Recently scoring customers. Since i left my day job, the little i get here is better than zero. I have a feeling it will scale bigger in the future as well. It might (big uncertainty) scale bigger than my old salary.
For my case, the best method so far is to interview and pitch to your target market.
Usually, 10 to 15 interviews would be enough to know. People in ur distant circle (friend of friend) would usually agree to coffee if you offer to pay.
The first idea usually doesn t make it. It evolves as i interview more people.
Face to face meet up has been more valuable to me than tools like facebook ads.
Yes. Yes. And yes.
(1) Do I like being the underdog?
(2) Do I seek the hard challenges that most people shy away from?
(3) Do I thrive when I take personal responsibility for success or failure?
The founders i've met have main two triggers.
(1) they want to solve a problem that they have encountered personally.
(2) they want more income for their family.
But as the article mentioned (and from my personal experience and my immediate circle's experience as well), more money for the family is probably a large mismatch for building a startup.
This write up articulates something very difficult to say very well.
Interesting. On first glance I was thinking the article was pertaining to Google Plus.
It was talking about the website after all - "Google is adding a personalised Facebook-style news feed to its homepage - Google.com".
This made it a lot interesting. Google Plus doesn't seem to be making it in our country. But Google Search has been here for a long time. The front end of it didn't change much for as long as I can remember. (The back end though seem to be mutating like a monster.)
I wonder how they're planning to target who sees what kind of content. But I think they pretty much have enough data gathered from all the email accounts and search results that everyone has been feeding them.
Looking forward to this update and more importantly how people will react to it.
(1) exercise - if possible every day. When everything for the day sucked, at least you have one accomplishment in your list.
(2) have me time - if possible once a week. For me it was to walk in the park every saturday morning.
Doing the above regularly gave me back a significant amount of sanity.
After two years, i recovered enough to "go meet people" again. Soon, i started to date again.
Best of luck.