You're worried about working one forty-hour week at "the day job" and another on your startup. I didn't do the moonlighting thing, I just jumped ship. For the first year or so I had a vision of what I was going to do that turned out to be completely unrelated to what I'm doing now.

I wrote a book, which is not a way to get rich, but is a great way to get clients interested in taking you seriously. I started a Mac application product, that got to public beta and then completely failed to ignite interest in its target market. Oh well, I learned a lot...

The important thing to note is that there is enough contracting work out there that you will not have a problem paying the rent while you build the business. Admittedly, you might have no money for anything else for a while. The great thing about contracting and consultancy is that even on less than a week every month, it keeps the wolves at the door and you can spend the other time researching, promoting, working on your product, or whatever.

Of course, if what you're interested in is specifically the contracting or consultancy, then you can spend the rest of the time doing more of that. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that setting up a consultancy is easy: people won't hire you if they haven't heard of you, and when you start out, no-one has heard of you. Quite a lot of what I do is app security consultancy for iPhone dev teams: to bootstrap that I used the aforementioned book, in addition to insinuating myself onto as many conference speaking gigs as I could manage. Each of those is unpaid, takes a lot of time, costs money, and is totally worth it.

A couple of general parting points:

• if you really don't know what you want to do in your company, or even whether it's a product or a consultancy, you shouldn't start the company. You're going to need to work some late nights for no pay for a while, so it's only going to be your belief that what you're doing will change the world that will keep you going.

• there's plenty of information on startups at the startups stack exchange.

You're worried about working one forty-hour week at "the day job" and another on your startup. I didn't do the moonlighting thing, I just jumped ship. For the first year or so I had a vision of what I was going to do that turned out to be completely unrelated to what I'm doing now.

I wrote a book, which is not a way to get rich, but is a great way to get clients interested in taking you seriously. I started a Mac application product, that got to public beta and then completely failed to ignite interest in its target market. Oh well, I learned a lot...

The important thing to note is that there is enough contracting work out there that you will not have a problem paying the rent while you build the business. Admittedly, you might have no money for anything else for a while. The great thing about contracting and consultancy is that even on less than a week every month, it keeps the wolves at the door and you can spend the other time researching, promoting, working on your product, or whatever.

Of course, if what you're interested in is specifically the contracting or consultancy, then you can spend the rest of the time doing more of that. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that setting up a consultancy is easy: people won't hire you if they haven't heard of you, and when you start out, no-one has heard of you. Quite a lot of what I do is app security consultancy for iPhone dev teams: to bootstrap that I used the aforementioned book, in addition to insinuating myself onto as many conference speaking gigs as I could manage. Each of those is unpaid, takes a lot of time, costs money, and is totally worth it.

A couple of general parting points:

• if you really don't know what you want to do in your company, or even whether it's a product or a consultancy, you shouldn't start the company. You're going to need to work some late nights for no pay for a while, so it's only going to be your belief that what you're doing will change the world that will keep you going.

• there's plenty of information on startups at the startups stack exchange.