Everyone on the internet tells you to quit your job and go all in.
The three founders in this Starter Story Build video did the opposite. They kept their paychecks and built apps making $15,000, $20,000, and $11,000 a month on the side.
One of them still works at Adobe. Right now. While his SaaS does $20K/month.
I pulled the numbers, the timelines, and the exact validation moves from the video so you can steal them. If you're grinding a 9-to-5 and wondering whether a side business is realistic, these three stories are your answer.
1. T.LY: a URL shortener doing $15,000 a month
A URL shortener. In 2026. Making $15K/month with 350,000 active users.
That's Tim Leland's side project. He built it while employed full time, and he built it because Google shut down its own URL shortening service in March 2019. Millions of users suddenly needed an alternative. Tim saw the gap and moved.
That's idea sourcing 101: watch what Google kills. There's a graveyard of free Google products, and every funeral leaves users looking for a paid replacement. Someone wins those users. Might as well be you.
The MVP took a few days. An API to shorten and expand links. That's it.
And that's the whole point of building with a full-time job: pick something simple enough to ship in days, not months. You don't have 60 hours a week. You have evenings.
Two things made T.LY grow when a thousand other link shorteners didn't:
→ A Chrome extension. Nobody else was shortening links inside the browser workflow. Small twist, big distribution. (His previous side project, a weather extension, already had 200,000 users. The guy knows extensions.)
→ A built-in growth loop. Every shortened link is an ad for T.LY. You share a link, your friend sees the domain, they shorten their own links. No ads, no sales calls. The product markets itself every time someone uses it.
Pricing is $5, $20, and $50 a month. Boring, simple, profitable.
Tim's advice on ideas stuck with me: write your ideas down, come back two weeks later, and see if they still excite you. Most won't. He's had hundreds of ideas and calls most of them terrible. The filter is time, not enthusiasm.
2. Backlinker AI: $20,000 a month while working at Adobe
Bennett Hayne built an AI-powered reporter outreach tool that gets clients backlinks. It hit $20K MRR in about 13 months.
He still has his full-time job. At Adobe. In growth marketing.
And that detail is the lesson. Bennett didn't build a random app. He built a product in the exact domain he already worked in: SEO and digital marketing. Years of paid-for expertise, applied to his own thing. If he'd launched a protein bar brand instead, he'd be starting from zero.
Your unfair advantage is whatever your employer has been training you on for years. Use it.
His validation sequence is the smartest part:
- He duct-taped the first version together with Zapier and rudimentary tools. No product, just automated processes.
- He sold the service on Fiverr as a freelancer. Real clients, real money, testing his tools on every order.
- Only after both worked did he build the actual SaaS.
He validated demand AND the tech before writing serious code. Most people do it backwards: build for six months, then discover nobody wants it.
The pricing is the other thing to steal. Backlinker charges $300 a month per client. That's $3,600 a year. At that price he only needs 60 to 70 clients to clear $20K/month.
Compare that to a $9/month app, where you'd need over 2,200 customers for the same revenue. Charging real money to real businesses is the cheat code for side projects. Fewer customers, less support, same MRR.
One more thing on outreach businesses like this one: the money isn't in the first email, it's in the follow-up. Most replies come from touch two, three, or four. If you're building anything sales-adjacent, study lead nurturing strategies before you write a single cold email. Bennett's whole product exists because most people are terrible at this.
3. Client Portal: an $11,000/month WordPress plugin she pre-sold before it existed
Laura Elizabeth was a full-time freelancer drowning in client emails. "Where's that link? How do I find the onboarding doc?" Every day.
So she made Client Portal: a WordPress plugin that gives each client one tidy page with all their links, files, and onboarding. She built it for herself, with zero intention of selling it.
It now does $11K/month, growing year over year.
Her quote from the video: "I didn't make Client Portal with the intention of even selling a product at all. I made it with the intention of using it. And in hindsight, that's what made it really successful."
Stop hunting for ideas. Look at your job. The problem annoying you today is annoying thousands of other people, and you understand it better than any outsider ever will.
But the move I really want you to steal is the pre-sale.
Laura wasn't a developer. She didn't have the cash or the time to build a plugin. So she sold it before it existed. $10,000 in pre-sales, from people who wanted it badly enough to pay for a product that wasn't built yet.
That $10K funded the developer. And the buyers waiting on the other end forced her to actually ship. She admits that without that pressure, Client Portal might never have launched.
$10,000 of validation before a single line of code got written. I've paid $13,000 for a mastermind with less proof behind it (it worked out, but still).
The time problem is actually a scoping problem
"I don't have time" is the objection I hear most from founders with day jobs.
But look at what these three actually built. A link shortener. An outreach automation. A client-facing WordPress page. None of them needed 40 hours a week. They needed a few focused evenings and the discipline to keep the scope tiny.
Tim says he builds side projects in his free time because he enjoys it. That's worth sitting with for a second. If your side project feels like a second job, you scoped it like a second job.
The constraint of a 9-to-5 is a feature. It forces you to cut everything that isn't essential. Full-time founders burn six months polishing features nobody asked for because they can. You can't. Good.
What these three did differently
Three different products. One playbook:
→ Simple enough to ship fast. T.LY's MVP took days. None of these are moonshots.
→ Built on existing knowledge. Bennett used his Adobe marketing skills. Laura solved her own freelance problem. Tim leaned on his extension experience.
→ Validated before building. Fiverr orders, pre-sales, a dead Google product with orphaned users. Demand first, code second.
→ Priced like a business, not a hobby. $300/month clients beat $5/month users when your building time is 10pm to midnight.
→ Kept the paycheck. The salary removed desperation, so there was no burning runway and no panic pivots. They quit (or will quit) from a position of strength.
The Starter Story team points out the same thing: Starter Story itself was built while its founder had a full-time job.
And in 2026, the "I can't code" excuse is mostly gone. Laura paid a couple thousand for a developer years ago. Today you'd ship the same plugin yourself in a couple of weeks with AI. I've watched complete non-technical founders do it. (If you want more idea starting points, I broke down the unsexy end of the spectrum in boring business ideas that make money, and the buildable end in micro SaaS ideas.)
FAQ
Can you really make $10,000 a month without quitting your job?
Yes. All three founders in this video did it: T.LY does $15K/month, Backlinker AI does $20K/month, and Client Portal does $11K/month, all built alongside full-time work. The pattern is a simple product, priced properly, in a domain the founder already understood.
How much time does a side business take with a full-time job?
Less than you'd think if you pick the right product. T.LY's MVP shipped in a few days. Bennett tested Backlinker with Zapier and Fiverr orders before building anything. The trick is scoping something you can ship in evenings and weekends, not cloning Salesforce.
Should I build my side project in the same industry as my day job?
Usually, yes. Bennett Hayne built an SEO tool while working in growth marketing at Adobe, and that head start compressed his path to $20K MRR into 13 months. Check your employment contract for IP clauses first, but your professional expertise is the biggest advantage you have.
How do I validate an idea before building it?
Sell it first. Laura Elizabeth collected $10,000 in pre-sales before Client Portal existed. Bennett sold his service manually on Fiverr before turning it into software. If nobody will pay before the product exists, that's your answer, and it cost you zero months of building.
When should you actually quit your job?
When the side income makes the decision boring. These founders waited until they were cash flowing. Some, like Bennett, still haven't quit at $20K MRR. The paycheck isn't holding you back, it's funding your runway.
Steal playbooks like these every week
I interview bootstrapped SaaS founders making $100K to $10M a year on the Profitable Founder Podcast. They walk me through their actual numbers and how they got their first customers, the stuff nobody puts in a launch tweet.
